


Watercolor Crossroad

by AshVee



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Allison Argent went to Hell, Crossroads Demon - Freeform, Demons are Kinky Bastards, Depression, Gratuitous Supernatural Themes, Multi, Purgatory, Scott McCall is a Bad Friend, Scott McCall is a White Knight (that is not a compliment), Stiles Stilinski is Part of the Pack, The 66 Seals, crossroads deal, crowley - Freeform, the sheriff's name is John
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-30
Updated: 2018-10-30
Packaged: 2019-08-11 00:37:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 37,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16465352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AshVee/pseuds/AshVee
Summary: Stiles Stilinski was good at talking, good at strategy and planning, which was why he got the best out of a crossroads demon deal. The best still isn't good, and the world around him is changing too fast, and not for the better.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> About...six months ago? I came across chapter one of a multichapter piece where Stiles makes a deal with a crossroads demon for the life of Allison Argent. I got tired of waiting and decided to take the idea in my own direction. That, of course, lead to a six month extravaganza where I wrote this...thing? I swear it was supposed to be a one shot no longer than 5-7,000 words.

Stiles was in darkness, the only light the pale moon shadow cast across swaying prairie grasses and the gravel backroad. Lavender was on the air, clouding the cloying scent of heat off of the Jeep engine. Minutes shy of midnight, he stood at a crossroads, dirt beneath his fingernails.

The box was buried. The photo, graveyard dirt, and the butterfly of a black cat’s pelvis all inside, waiting. Nothing had happened, but with each passing second, a tension rose in the air, charged and electric. He was ready when a woman stepped from the air between blinks. 

She was beautiful, but he supposed if you had your pick of bodies, you would be nothing else. She smiled full, coral lips at him, carefree and easy, and he smiled back. He was ready, after all. He’d called her. 

“What can I do for such a sweet young man?” she asked, her voice honey and promise. She stepped lightly, feet bare on the gravel, skin soaking up the moon and infusing her pale and perfect.

“I want to make a deal.” 

“Everyone wants a deal, but few realize the price.” She tossed midnight hair back over her narrow shoulders, the curls bouncing in riots. “Nothing in life is free, sweetling, not even for such a face.”

“I’m asking a lot,” he said, because it was best she know the cards on the table early. “I’m willing to lose a lot.”

“Are you willing to lose your life?” she asked, innocence evaporating. “Because it’s the only coin in your pocket, little human.” 

“My life, my death,” he said, nodding. “All the time in between, all the time after.” He pulled three photographs from the back pocket of his jeans and held them up toward her. “For them.” 

“Sweetheart, your soul isn’t worth three lives,” she said, stepping toward him. She picked the photos out of his hand with delicate pianist’s fingers. “Why don’t you pick one? What about the blonde? She looks like a fighter; she’d make you a good lover for the time.” She held up Erica’s photo between her fingertips. 

“I’ll give you my death for her,” he agreed. “Going rate is ten years?”

“Ten years to appreciate what I’ll be giving you.” 

“Then I’ll give you those ten years for the brunette.” 

She cocked her head at him, consideringly. She stepped closer, hands reaching toward his neck. She’d pull him in, he knew, finish the deal. He backpedalled. 

“My service for those ten years,” he clarified. “Would you give me her life for ten years of my life on earth? To have a pawn? There’s a war on, you could use a human ace in your hand.” 

She paused, hands falling back to her sides. There was a sharpness to her gaze then, careful and evaluating. She’d just realized she’d sat down at the table with someone willing and able to play her game, someone maybe more capable at it than she.

“Fail me and I’ll take your life,” she cautioned, “Whenever it pleases me. In three years, in five.” 

“Why would you do that?” he asked. “When I’m going to keep living, keep working for you long after ten years are up?”

“For the boy?” she asked, a smile on her lips. “You are a shrewd one. Such a beautiful brain under that pretty face. Can you do as you claim? Work for me? It won’t be a pleasant experience. Is your soul capable of such things?”

“Lady, you have no idea of what I’m capable. I’ve been the vessel of a nogitsune. I’ve run with wolves. I’ve killed to protect what’s mine, and those?” He gestured toward the photos. “Those are mine.”

“I believe you,” she said, crossing the distance between them. Her delicate chin rose, eyes flashing the black of oil spilled on tarmac. Her lips grazed his, the extension of a pen, and he pressed forward, signing his name with skin and spit for the first time — the last time — in his life.

He pulled away, her taste on his tongue, and met her smile with his own. 

“We’re going to have such fun,” she said, teeth flashing in the dark. “I’ll give you a week, little one. Rest up; I’ve got games in store.”

#

The engine whined in unrepentant agony under the influx of gas. She’d forgive him eventually, but he’d never forgive himself if he didn’t make it to the graveyard. 

The Beacon Hills Cemetery stretched out in front of him as he brought her to a skittering stop in the gravel parking lot. He left the driver’s door hanging open, engine ticking, as he ran under the wrought iron archway. Willow branches snatched at his arms, overgrown grass tangling in his shoe laces. 

They’d been buried toward the front of the graveyard, and Stiles had spent the better part of the day before in an old caution vest and a backhoe. No one asked questions as he dug up the graves, exposing the dulled coffins beneath. It was amazing what the world was willing to tolerate when you were confident. 

He heard the distant shouting and striking of fists against wood as he slid in the grass, falling into the first grave. There was a small hand-axe left atop it, and he laid into the foot of the coffin, making a gap and tearing with his hands until he could see Erica’s feet. Wood bit into the fleshy pads of his fingers and blood ran down into the graveyard dirt.

He only made a hole big enough for moonlight and air to filter through before he did the same to Allison and Boyd’s graves. He called to them as he worked, trying to keep them calm, but they’d woken disoriented and frightened, in their own coffins. Even after he’d torn the wood away completely, after his hands bled from wounds that exposed bone, they were still shaking and huddled together beneath the willows.

“It’s alright,” he hushed, kneeling down in front of them, blankets and water bottles clutched awkwardly in bleeding hands. “I’ve got you now.” 

“Stiles?” Erica asked, voice hoarse and aching. The white dress her parents had buried her in was murky with dirt and grass stains and shadow.

“Yeah, Catwoman,” he said, giving her a soft smile. He lay one of his hands against her shoulder, fingers aching as they kneaded the muscle there. “Yeah.”

Allison was tucked against Erica’s side, scoop neck sweater and brown leather jacket and jeans so very familiar on her that it was almost laughable. Her father had known her so well in life that he’d laid her to rest in one of her favorite outfits. 

“Scott?” Allison asked, but Stiles just nodded, pressing a water bottle into her hands. Another, he lay in Erica’s lap, but it was ignored when the wolf launched herself at him, burying her face into his throat and sobbing in broken, shaking hiccups. Allison followed not a moment later. 

Boyd, who had stayed several feet off, on his knees and shaky in an off-the-rack suit, made a pained little noise in the back of his throat before shuffling forward and pressing his forehead into Stiles’s shoulder. 

“I’ve got you,” he repeated, tipping his own head down to rest on top of the wolf’s. “I’ve got all of you.” 

Sweat clung to them in the night with the sounds of barn owls and alley cats and sweet wind. The sobs wore themselves out, and in the darkness, they slowly pulled themselves back together. 

“Let’s get you all home,” Stiles said once the last of them had finally pulled away. It was the wrong thing to say, because Boyd’s head snapped up, and Erica’s shoulders stiffened again. 

“Home?” she asked. “What home? We’re dead; we don’t even have an alpha. How can we—”

“I’ll get you an alpha,” Stiles said, because he couldn’t comfort them about the rest, about their family, about how the world had laid them to rest. 

“Derek,” Boyd said, voice firm. “Not an alpha. Derek.” 

“A lot’s happened since...Derek isn’t an alpha anymore, but we’ll find him, see if we can find his alpha. Let’s get you back to the house, get you cleaned up, and take it from there?”

“He’s got to be so angry,” Erica said. Her voice was small, less than Stiles had ever remembered hearing it. 

“He was upset,” he said, rubbing circles into the back of her neck. “He’s just going to be happy to see you again. He’s not living in Beacon Hills, but he’ll come back for you.”

“Where’s my dad?” Allison asked, as if the thought of loved ones was enough to startle her out of the silence she’d descended into. “And Scott?”

“Your dad...moved,” Stiles said as easily as he could. “I’ve got a phone number, for emergencies, but it might be better if I ask him to come back before he knows.” 

Allison nodded, her mind already running a thousand miles an hour and a thousand miles away and to a thousand different things her father might do if he didn’t see her when he found out. 

“We can’t go home,” Erica said, voice soft and steady. She looked at her tombstone for the first time since being pulled out of the grave. Carefully, she stood, muscles still weak and stiff from being in disuse for so long. She moved with werewolf grace, which was something Stiles was going to have to address eventually. 

She laid her fingers against her name on the stone, running the tip of her pinky finger against the R in Reyes. 

“How long’s it been?” she asked, turning suddenly to him. “How did all this happen, Stiles? Boyd and Allison and...oh, god, we were all dead. My parents think I’m…”

“You can go back,” Stiles said, placating. “But it might not—”

“They already mourned us once,” Boyd interrupted, shaking his head. “My siblings already had to mourn me once. They don’t know about any of this. Werewolves, magic, none of it.” 

“I never thought I was the lucky one,” Allison said, voice soft. “You can stay with us.” 

“They’re going to need an alpha,” Stiles cautioned. “Derek—”

“What about Scott?” Allison asked. She was on her feet now too. “Scott can be their alpha.” 

“Scott’s an alpha?” Erica turned away from the grave and helped Boyd to his feet. “Scott?” 

“There’s a lot to talk about,” Stiles said, hands up. “Let’s get you all back to my place, get you showered and fed and then we can talk.” 

Allison’s jaw set, but she nodded a moment later.

#

Erica sat on the end of his bed, carefully combing out her damp hair where it rested against one of his hoodies. Allison had already showered and dressed — Batman t-shirt and a pair of his sweat pants tied too tight — and was scrolling through current events on the Yahoo! News reel. The background noise of the shower cut off, and Boyd came through a moment later, sweats stretched but fitting him well enough, one of Derek’s old henlys on that Stiles had found abandoned in his closet from years past. 

“Where’s Scott?” Allison asked as soon as Boyd had joined Erica.

Stiles scrubbed a hand over his face, his hair, wincing at how long it felt between his fingers, at the throbbing ache in his bones. 

“Scotty-boy’s been busy lately,” he said, voice as even as he could make it. “There’s been a lot going on. He’s lost some of his pack.” 

“Pack?” Boyd asked, perking up. He had taken well to the idea of Pack, of family, mostly because his own home life, while not perfect, had been loving. 

“A few kids from school. A kitsune.” 

“Kira?” Allison asked, voice neutral. Stiles just nodded, and Allison fell silent. 

“Derek left with Cora a few—”

“Who’s Cora?” 

“His sister—”

“Derek’s sister is alive? I thought Peter—”

“The other sister—”

“Why didn’t he tell us he had—”

“Erica!” Boyd said, jostling her. “Let the man finish.” 

Stiles smiled at the pair of them, obviously taking comfort in the feeling of another body, warm and whole, beside them. He ducked his head, smiled despite himself, and broke down into shaking laughter. 

It was nearly three hours later that they finally understood why his smiles and easy laughter were shattered at their core. 

“I want to find Derek,” Boyd said, voice solid and sure. Erica nodded beside him, though she looked less convinced. “He made us...and we weren’t the best betas he could have asked for.” 

“He’s grown,” Stiles agreed. “He wasn’t an alpha, the last time I checked though.” 

“So we find him and his new alpha and we figure things out,” Erica said, sure of herself in a way that was half confidence and half a lie. “Could...is Isaac still…”

“I’ll call Chris,” Stiles said finally, “see if he’s still with him.” 

The wolves nodded, and Allison stiffened beside them. 

“I...don’t think I should be here, when you call,” she said easily. “I don’t know if I could be quiet.” 

“I’ll handle it,” Stiles agreed. “There’s some left over chili down in the kitchen.” 

When the three of them filed out, Stiles tapped away at his cell, careful and measured. He had to be measured, had to have a plan for each step of the way from now on. He only had a week afterall. 

He hit the contact with more force than necessary. The other end of the line rang through twice before Chris picked up. 

“What?” he said, voice gravel and annoyance. 

“Chris?” Stiles asked. “Chris Argent?” He didn’t need the confirmation. 

“Who is this?” 

“Stiles Stilinski. I was Scott’s friend in—”

“Beacon Hills,” Chris said on the other end. “I have no interest in anything—”

“It’s about Allison. It’s important. We need you here.” The other end fell silent for several long minutes. “Chris?” 

“I’ll be there,” he said, and had nearly hung up the phone when Stiles cut in again. 

“Bring Isaac.” 

“We’ll be there.” The line went dead. 

Stiles hung his head, rubbed a hand over the growing tension at the nape of his neck, and blew out a sigh. The flight from London to Los Angeles would take them at least twelve hours. The to and from and security, the drive to Beacon Hills…

He pulled up the contact again and typed out: 

COME TO MY HOUSE. THERE’S A LOT THAT CAN’T BE SAID OVER THE PHONE. AND BRING ISAAC.

He sent the text and prayed. There was no response. 

He squared his jaw, straightened his spine, and rose from the end of his bed where he’d sunk into it. He still had to find out if the wolves were still wolves, if any of them wanted to reach out to their parents, and Lydia was—

Lydia. 

“Fuck, me,” Stiles groaned, and headed for the door. 

Below, the three were talking in hushed voices. Allison thought her voice was pitched low enough he couldn’t hear it, even coming down the stairs, if the way she spoke was any indication. 

“He wasn’t Stiles,” she said, explaining. It only took a moment to figure out what she meant by that. “It wasn’t…”

“But not like he is now?” Boyd clarified, and Stiles made a noise in the doorway that was only half intentional.

“Your dad and Isaac should be here, maybe by tonight. He wasn’t specific as to when before he hung up.” 

“They heard,” Allison said, nodding toward Boyd and Erica. 

“Speaking of. You’re still wolves? Still,” Stiles gestured toward his eyes. The pair flashed beta gold at him, and he nodded. “Good. That’s good at least.” 

“How are we...how are we alive?” Allison asked, almost hesitant, like she didn’t want to know, didn’t want to process that she’d been dead. “I was...the last thing I remember was Scott looking down at me, and then...” 

“I’d take that,” Erica quipped, eyes going to Boyd, who only tightened his jaw and nodded. “Purgatory was a bitch.” 

“Purgatory?” Allison asked, but she wasn’t to be distracted for long. “How are we here?” Sharp eyes fell on Stiles, who blew out a breath and sat down at the kitchen table only after retrieving his father’s bottle of whiskey and a tumbler. He poured two fingers and sipped at it a moment. 

“I got you out,” he said simply. “Business transaction, and your lives are yours again, as much as they can be after you were legally declared dead.” 

“My dad can get us—”

“What was the business transaction?” Boyd asked, shrewdness in his tone. Boyd had always been one to sit back and see far too much.

“There are costs to crossroads deals,” he said carefully. “I managed to get out of them for the most part.” 

“Crossroads deals...Stiles!” Allison got it first, as he knew she would. She was on her feet and pacing in a moment, the kitchen chair forgotten where it clattered to the ground. “Why would you do that? Do you have any idea—”

“What’s a crossroads deal?” Erica asked, eyes narrowed.

“A deal with a demon,” Allison ranted. “An idiotic deal with a demon to get something for ten years. Oh god, are we going to die in ten years? Is that how it works? What do you pay if...oh...Oh, no, Stiles.” 

There was heavy realization on her face, melancholy suddenly in every line of her. Strong shoulders slumped forward, jaw loose and lips parted like she wanted to speak but didn’t know how.

“I’ll take ten years,” Boyd said. “Ten years is a long time I didn’t get to live. I’ll go in ten years.” He was staring down at his hands, as if he didn’t want to meet anyone’s eyes, and Stiles knew what it was. Boyd didn’t want to go in ten years. He didn’t want to have a taste of life and know he’d have to give it up.

“Not us,” Allison said uneasily, words awkward like she couldn’t make her tongue work properly. “Not us in ten years.” 

“That’s not how my deal went,” Stiles said, hands up, trying to placate her. “I had something she wanted more. It’s alright. No one’s dying in ten years.” 

“But there’s always…” Allison’s brow drew together, and she rubbed at her temple. “There’s always a cost in those stories, Stiles.” 

“And there was,” he said, shrugging. “Look at me. Do I look any worse for wear to you? Do I look like I lost something I can’t live without? Ali...you guys...you’re going to be everything to so many people, even if you can’t tell your families. Derek and Cora and Scott and Isaac and Lydia and just...everyone.” 

“But what did you—”

“I did what I did,” Stiles said, voice sharp for the first time since he’d pulled them out of their graves. “That’s all you need to know. Now, there are literally years of shit you need caught up on. First, Severus Snape has died.” 

“Oh, Alan Rickman,” Erica said, sadly. It was easy to see the way she clung to the out, the difficult conversation in her rear view mirror. Stiles ran with it. 

“Bowie, too,” Stiles confirmed. Allison looked like she was going to argue. Boyd stared at him with heavy eyes, but in the end, they wound up on the couch in the living room, watching Labrynth.

#

For formerly dead people, the three of them slept an exorbitant amount through the morning and afternoon and late into the evening. Stiles managed to worm his way out from between where he’d been sandwiched between Erica and Allison, but only by the skin of his teeth. 

The wolves had even slept through the mailman dropping off a package and Stiles cooking dinner, an odd occurrence no matter how you looked at it. It wasn’t until ten o’clock at night that his phone buzzed on the coffee table. 

LANDED AND PICKED UP A RENTAL IN LA. BE THERE IN THIRTY.

Stiles nodded to himself, tossed the phone back down to the table, and sighed. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, this surprise he had for Chris Argent, but he’d learned in the short time he’d known the man that surprising him was a bad idea. 

“Alright,” he muttered, and went to put on a pot of coffee. After second thought, he also filled the kettle and put it on the stove and got another pair of tumblers from the cabinet. 

Footsteps echoed behind him not ten minutes later. 

“Why are there dead kids on my sofa?” John asked, picking up the tumbler Stiles pushed across to him. John was tired, had been tired for weeks really. The introduction of the supernatural world in conjunction with the everyday evil of humanity had taken its toll on him far harder lately than Stiles would have liked.

“Dead Tom’s not dead,” Stiles said easily. John ignored the reference if he got it and downed the drink. 

“Is there some evil on the horizon I should know about?” 

“No.” 

“Then I’m going to bed.” 

John left the empty glass behind. Stiles wondered if that was going to become a regular occurrence.

#

The doorbell rang out twice by the time Stiles made it to the door, nerves making his hands shake. Allison and the wolves were still asleep, though they’d moved around when Stiles had run through the living room. 

Chris Argent stood on the other side, grim faced and bone weary. There was grey at his temples and in his salt and pepper stubble. 

“This better be good, kid,” Chris said. The familiarity of the glare, the angle of his jaw, the derision in his tone, was comforting. 

“Isaac?” Stiles asked, glancing past him. 

“Sleeping in the car.” 

“Good,” Stiles said, stepping aside. “Come on in.” 

Stiles walked Chris toward the living room. “This is going to come as a shock, but I need you to know everything’s alright.” 

“What are you—” He started to ask, but his words dried up on his tongue, one foot frozen in the doorway. Every line of the hunter screamed out in a cacophony of rage and panic and hope and fear all at once. 

“She’s alright,” Stiles promised, hands up. “She’s herself, and she’s here to stay.” 

“You did this?” Chris asked, voice thick and syrupy. “How did...” 

“I reached an agreement with someone who had the power to do something about it,” Stiles said, not willing to admit to what he’d done. Chris’s sharp eyes flickered to him a moment. 

“A crossroads deal,” he said, nodding. “No one would deal with me.” 

“You’re a hunter; demons don’t deal with hunters.” 

“All three of them? What did you give up for...Jesus, Stiles.” 

“I’m a good negotiator.” 

“Would you get Isaac? He’s going to want—”

“On it,” Stiles said. He left Chris staring wide-eyed toward the couch. He thought about offering the man a seat, grabbing one from the kitchen, but Chris was just standing there, staring.

Out in the twilight, Stiles breathed in the clean air, letting it sweep away the tension in his spine. Chris had taken it well, hadn’t asked too many questions, and hopefully, no one else would know enough to ask. Their rental was an old Mazda 3, beaten up and probably no longer suitable for a rental car company, but Isaac sat in the front passenger seat, propped against the door. 

He looked older, which was an idiotic thing to notice. They were all older now than they’d been, but Isaac looked older in a settled way. Before, he’d have never settled against the window and snoozed in a rental while someone else was at the wheel. 

“Isaac,” Stiles said, standing a few paces off. The wolf’s eyes shot open, and he sat upright, one hand on the door handle, the other disappeared down beneath his seat. “Easy. I’m not going to hurt you.” 

Human eyes flickered over to Stiles, taking him in from hair tip to toe before flashing gold eyes at him. A slow smile spread over his lips, and a moment later, he climbed out of the Mazda. 

“Stiles,” he said, reaching out and pulling him into a jaw rubbing hug. It was awkward for a moment before Stiles remembered that this was normal in a healthy wolf pack, and Stiles had been part of that, back before everything fell apart. Just because Scott didn’t teach the pack their instincts were healthy didn’t mean they weren’t. 

“Hey, man,” Stiles said. “You look good.” 

“Yeah, Chris has been...he’s been great. You scared us pretty bad. What’s…” His head tilted to the side, eyes flashing and nostrils flaring as if to catch a scent on the wind. Those gold eyes drifted up over Stiles’ shoulder and locked there. His body stiffened, held ramrod straight and still, as if he didn’t trust himself to move. 

“Is that… Stiles is that…” 

“Yeah, buddy,” Stiles said, patting him on the shoulder. He gestured back toward the house with his head. “Go on.” 

The wolf didn’t take a second prompting. He was gone, through the door and into the house before Stiles so much as blinked. Stiles dropped his head back, stared up at the night sky for a few long minutes, and blew out a sigh. 

“Not half bad, Stilinski,” he muttered to himself. “Not half bad.” 

#

Not telling Scott or Lydia was perhaps the shittiest thing he’d done in a long while, which was saying something, all things considered. Except, if it hadn’t worked, if the demon had told him to get bent...well, this was better. 

It was better until the sun came up the next morning and he had Erica, Boyd, Allison, Chris, and Isaac all sitting around his breakfast table, chatting and asking too many questions. 

“What’s the pack like now?”  
“Where’s Derek?”  
“What do you mean you don’t know?”  
“Can I talk to Lydia?”  
“What are we going to do now?”

“Look,” Stiles said, raising his voice over the three panicking teenagers — because Stiles had come to realize suddenly and with great force that they’d died teenagers and their minds were still the same. “I can get Scott and Lydia here in an hour, but you all have to decide what you want first.” 

“What we want?” Boyd asked, carefully neutral. “I want to go see my family, but I can’t do that. I won’t do that. So what I want after is to go find the pack I shouldn’t have left.” 

Erica flinched beside him, but she nodded. Allison was carefully blank faced, as if she wasn’t sure what was possible anymore. 

“You can’t stay here,” Chris said at last. “Not and still be who you were. I have a contact could get you reasonable aliases that would hold up to basic scrutiny. Get you jobs, buy airplane tickets. But people in town will recognize you.” 

“So we leave,” Erica said simply, shrugging one shoulder. “We say goodbye, let the local pack know we’re alive, and we go.” 

“I’ll get you to Derek,” Stiles promised. “You can go from there. Chris, you have Allison?” 

“Yes—” 

“No,” Allison said, cutting him off. “I...Erica and Boyd and I talked. We’re staying together. What if I don’t handle this well? What if I wake up and I’m still...there? What if I hurt someone?” 

Stiles hadn’t asked where any of them were in the afterlife, didn’t want to drag anything up if it was an open wound, but now? With Allison coming so close to admitting where she’d been? That she remembered where she’d been?

“No, Ali,” Stiles said, a little part of him aching. “You weren’t…” 

“I was only alive sixteen years, Stiles,” she said, voice pitched low. “In that time, I helped torture an innocent, shot at people, let my friends…” 

They fell silent, Chris staring sitelessly at his daughter. Stiles couldn’t process that, couldn’t let himself consider that he’d left his friend, someone he’d killed...dead and rotting in hell for years.

“Do you...you want to see Scott? Lydia?” Stiles asked after his mind stopped fracturing. “In the morning, I mean. It’s late, and you should all get some sleep.” 

“Please.” 

Stiles nodded and left the room. There was only so much stimulus he could handle at once. 

#

Lydia had felt off for going on twenty-four hours. It was an odd sensation, like a pressure at the back of her throat. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to scream or draw in a deeper breath, but every time she tried either, it just sort of faltered into nothingness. 

It was a discomfiting feeling, but it was fading, now little more than a sour taste on her tongue. She could ignore it until it went away. 

Carefully tucking her ID into her purse and assuring she had everything she’d need for a cathartic shopping experience that would border on the religious, she stepped out into the foyer of her home. 

It had been two weeks since anything supernatural had happened, two weeks since she’d even had to so much as see anyone with ties to the otherworld. It should have made her feel more guilty than it did, abandoning Scott’s pack like she had, but more and more, it didn’t feel like home. More and more, Stiles wasn’t there. 

Of course, he’d been dodging her phone calls and her visits, too. Which was why religiously cathartic shopping was going to occur right after—

The delicate chime of her ringtone echoed in the little foyer, and she considered ignoring it a moment. The name flashing across the screen had her hitting the ignore button once and once again and once more for good measure before she picked up. 

“I deserved two of those,” he said on the other end. 

“You deserve as many of those as I deem to put you through.” 

“I’ll take it, but you’re going to feel bad once you see the present I got you.” 

“It had better be designer,” Lydia said.

“It’s certainly one of a kind. Come get it?” 

“What? You can’t deliver your apology present?” 

“It’s too big to throw in the mail. Be at my house in ten.” 

The phone call cut off before she could retort. She stared down at the screen, half offended and half curious. Resigned to being there in eleven minutes, she picked at her fingernails and slid on a pair of her wedge heels. Comfort, after all, could go hand in hand with style.

The drive to the Stilinski residence took about ten minutes, and when she neared, a feeling of vindictiveness struck her. She circled the block three times before parking behind an unfamiliar car and walked toward the door. 

She didn’t bother knocking, just let herself in. The familiar sound of Saturday morning cartoons drew her to the living room. She was tucking her car keys into her bag when she stepped into the den, talking without looking. Stiles was always there, in front of the television. 

“This had better be worth the drive out here, Stilinski,” she said, eyes still on her bag. The damned clasp had been finicky lately, and she’d almost dumped the contents twice this morning already. 

“I hope it is,” a girl’s voice said, and Lydia froze, hands slipping from the bag strap. It struck the ground with a crack, her lipstick, car keys, and a handful of change spilling out onto the carpet. 

It was familiar, too terribly familiar, and Lydia couldn’t look up, wouldn’t look up. She wasn’t losing her mind, not again. She wasn’t. 

Delicate hands picked up her bag, a dark head of hair hung over narrow but strong shoulder, and after a moment, an angel’s face stared up at her, a smile on her lips. 

“I think I’m an alright surprise,” Alison said, and just like that, Ali was in her arms, and Lydia couldn’t help the terrible, wracking sobs that broke out of her chest. 

An untold amount of time later, makeup smudged and hideous, nose and cheeks blotchy, Lydia pulled away, laughing and crying all at once. Erica and Boyd smiled at her from a few feet away, and she hugged them in turn, sobs coming in waves until finally, finally, she pulled away and looked across the living room. Chris Argent stood a few paces off, jaw firm, Isaac Lahey beside him, eyes shining with tears. 

That odd fullness in her throat swelled in the next moment as her eyes slid over Stiles, and like a fault line busting loose, she screamed. 

#

Stiles fidgeted uncomfortably at the kitchen counter, pouring himself yet another cup of coffee in hopes it would calm his nerves. The fullness in his chest from father and daughter, packmate, and finally best friend reunion had yet to dissipate completely, but it had soured when Lydia had screamed. 

The banshee apologised, unsure of why it had happened, and Stiles had been quick to cover up the truth of the matter. Erica, Boyd, and Allison had been dead. Her banshee wires had gotten crossed. It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Stiles had sold his soul to a demon, that while he’d be alive and well far longer than the ten years normally on the table, it would most likely alter the core of him. 

Stiles Stilinski, he figured, died when he kissed that demon in the dark. 

The coffee scalded his tongue, but he swallowed it down anyway. It was painful, but it helped take his mind off of everything else.

Like the demon who would come knocking in six days. Like Scott who still hadn’t shown up. Like Derek and Cora and Peter and Maliha who all seemed incapable of returning an email… That wasn’t exactly fair considering he’d only sent it twelve hours ago.

Checking his inbox again despite himself, he took his mug and went back into the Stilinski family living room that was quickly becoming a thoroughfare for lost souls and their loved ones. 

“Alright,” he said, setting the mug down and pocketing his cell. “Who wants lunch? Pizza? No offense, but I really don’t feel like going out and picking something up or cooking for the masses, so...pizza? Good. Pizza.” 

Lydia was still looking at him sideways every time she managed to take her eyes off of Allison, but that wasn’t much different than baseline. 

“Do we need to call Deaton?” Lydia asked while Stiles was punching in their order on his laptop. “To check them out, I mean.” 

“Whatever you want,” Stiles said, absently. The veterinarian would know there were only so many ways to raise the dead. Stiles knew, so Deaton surely would. Necromancy only allowed so many options, and most spells ended with the risen under the control of the raiser. Blood magic ended once the blood ran dry. Angels had their whole ‘do not interfere’ bullshit going on more often than not. Demons, as it turned out, were the best game in town, the most consistent game.

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” Chris said, quelling the circus that would have followed. “Stiles and I talked. There’s no need.” 

“Stiles and you talked?” Lydia asked, that edge to her voice that meant he was about to get his ass chewed. “Care to comment on how you suddenly gained the ability to raise the dead?”

“Not particularly.” 

The silence that followed should have bothered him. He should care Lydia was glaring at him. He should care the others were worried. He should. For the life of him, with the weight of his actions resting on his shoulders, he couldn’t bring himself to bother.

“Do you two have to fight about this now?” Allison asked, tone carefully neutral. “I’m just happy to be alive, and I know Scott will want to—”

“Scott?” Lydia asked, voice a careful edge of derision. “Why are we talking about our Lord True Alpha?” 

“Ali wanted to see him, and he was part of their pack,” Stiles said easily with a shrug. “It’s not a big—”

“Oh, it absolutely is a big deal, Stiles. Where is he? I don’t see him—”

“I called him, left a voicemail. Sent him a text.” 

“When?” 

“Last night,” Stiles said. That startled the three sitting on the couch. “He probably hasn’t listened to the voicemail, and I didn’t want to say too much over a text message.” 

Lydia was already tapping away at her phone. Shrewd eyes cut to Stiles fleetingly before floating over to Allison. “Do you really want to see him? His wolf smell is going to be stuck in my nose for days, and I can’t say as—”

“Yes,” Ali said simply, a frown between her eyebrows. “Why wouldn’t I want to see him?” 

“Because he’s a white knight with a hero complex as big as his ego.” 

“Hey, now,” Stiles said, shooting the banshee a look he hoped would calm her. “Scott’s a good Alpha, and that’s what they need right now, at least until I can get ahold of the Hales.” 

“Scott is as terrible an Alpha as he is a friend,” Lydia said. Her look dared Stiles to argue, so he simply threw his ankle up onto his knee and kept on adding food to the Grubhub order on the screen. There were three wolves, a banshee, and two humans under his roof, and for the life of him, he couldn’t decide if seven or eight pizzas were enough in the setting of five dozen wings and a metric fuck ton of french fries. 

Even as he fiddled with the payment screen, he could feel Lydia’s eyes on him, weighing and measuring. She was chatting idly with Allison and Boyd and Erica, filling them in on this and that, but she never stopped evaluating Stiles with her eyes. 

He shifted uncomfortably, finishing paying, and slammed the computer shut with shaking hands. He’d never been good under her scrutiny, and that hadn’t changed in the last few years. 

“It’s really amazing what you did, Stiles,” she said in a lull in conversation. “I would have given anything to have Allison back in those first few months. I would have done anything.” 

There was knowledge in her tone, judgemental resignation in her eyes when he finally looked up at her. 

“Let’s go get the pizza,” Stiles said, standing. He’d call the pizzeria on the way, cancel the delivery, and give her time to shout at him in the interim. 

“Let’s,” she agreed. “We’ll be back. Don’t disappear while I’m gone.” Her hand lingered on Allison’s shoulder for a moment. The brunette looked between them for a moment, confusion between her eyes, but nodded all the same.

Stiles lead the way to his Jeep, feeling very much like the sacrificial goat in Jurassic Park. There was a vague, sinking feeling that, like that goat, his entrails were about to decorate a windshield.

Both doors shut with more snap than needed. The car started in silence, and Stiles thanked whatever deities were out there that Lydia seemed willing to defer his execution, at least for a few moments more. 

The pizzeria wouldn’t refund him his delivery fee, but they would let him pick up the food, which was half a win at the moment he was willing to take. 

“When Allison died,” Lydia said as they pulled into the pizzeria lot ten minutes early, “I wasn’t as well versed in things as I am now. I hadn’t had time to evaluate all my options, but I did some superficial looking. There wasn’t a way, Stiles. There just wasn’t a way to have her and have her back. There were ways of having her back where she wouldn’t be herself, where it would be temporary, superficial, but not her.”

“She’s herself,” Stiles assured. “And it’s not temporary...I mean she’s mortal, but she’s not just going to timeout or something.” 

“That’s what I was afraid of.” She sighed, long and loud. “What did you do? Threaten something with the power to raise the dead? Some angel? A fey?”

“I didn’t threaten anyone,” he said, and accepted his fate. “I made a deal.” 

“You made a deal.” 

“I made a deal.” 

“You made a deal!” Lydia shrieked, slapping his shoulder once and then again. “You are not this stupid, Stiles! No one just gives you your friends back. There’s always—”

“I know, Lyds. I did my research. There’s always something to pay back later, but honestly, it’s not as terrible as it could have been.” It couldn’t be, because if he let himself think it was, he might break down and hide in a closet for the next week. 

Lydia stewed in silence for several long minutes, huffed something unintelligible under her breath, and left the car, slamming the door behind. The poor son of a bitch at the counter looked like he would rather shove his head in a blender as Lydia paid for the pizza, and Stiles quietly commiserated with him through the windshield and the front window.

The pizza was shoved in the back unceremoniously, and when Lydia had done her seat belt, settled her purse on the floor, and crossed her legs, she glared at him pointedly. 

“Who?” 

“Who—”

“Do not play dumb with me, Stilinski.”

“A crossroads demon.” 

“A crossroads demon,” Lydia echoed, her voice that oddly vacant tone she’d had nearly constantly in high school. “Demon deals are permanent, solvent, they always make good on both sides of the agreement. The crossroads demon’s power comes from keeping their deals.” 

“That’s why I went with them.” 

“So, we have ten years to figure out how to kill a crossroads demon.” 

“No, you have the rest of your life with your best friend. Erica and Boyd have time to have a pack, a family.” 

“And you have what? Ten years to watch it all? Because I know you, Stilinski, you’re not going to settle down and leave some woman high and dry with a ten year old kid asking where Daddy went. What the fuck did you think—”

“I have a week to get Allison, Erica, and Boyd settled,” Stiles said, staring at the steering wheel. In the silence that followed, he turned the key in the ignition, put the car in drive, and let the road take them. 

“There were three of them,” Lydia said softly. When he glanced over, there were tears in her eyes. 

“I’m a better negotiator than Scott ever gave me credit for,” Stiles said. “I’m not going to die. The deal wasn’t for my life. It was for my service.” 

“Oh, Stiles,” Lydia said, as if that was somehow worse than if he’d just dropped dead in a week. 

As if… And it was, wasn’t it? There were things he’d rather die before he did, and his life and his death were no longer his own. The decision wasn’t his any longer. He’d turn into everything Scott thought he was. He’d turn into everything—

“Stiles, Stiles, sweetie, pull the car over, please,” Lydia said, her voice right in his ear, loud over the roaring of his heart. He took his foot off the gas pedal, and the roaring died. The RPMs dropped, and he realized it was the engine, not the blood in his ears. He eased the Jeep to the shoulder, chest tight and breath coming in little gasps. 

“Come on,” she said, easing him across into her seat as she backed out the door. He sat in the passenger seat, mind fracturing and piecing itself back together as she drove. By the time they’d circled the block once or twice, he’d calmed enough to go back to the house. 

“We’ll talk,” she said. “But not in front of them.” 

“I don’t want them feeling responsible.” 

“They aren’t, and neither are you.” 

The choked laugh was wrong to even his own ears. 

“Our Lord Alpha is here,” Lydia said, gesturing toward the lawn with her chin. A motorbike lay on its side in the grass. As they walked past, Lydia might have kicked the side mirror on accident; she might have done it on purpose. 

“He didn’t mean anything—”

“He called you a murderer and made you feel like a piece of shit for defending yourself,” Lydia said. She wouldn’t hear anything further on the argument, hadn’t in a couple weeks. She wouldn’t now, and it wasn’t the time. Hell, at this point, Stiles didn’t know if there’d ever be time. 

The door opened and closed without fanfare, and Stiles found Erica, Boyd, Isaac, and Chris in the kitchen, sitting awkwardly around the table. 

“They needed a minute,” Boyd offered, tilting his head toward the living room.

“That’s fair,” Stiles offered, setting the pizza down. “Leave some for Allison and Scott. I’m going to head upstairs and check my email.” 

The quiet of his room was deafening as he paced the length of it once and once more. The desktop was booting up in the corner. His laptop was downstairs, in the living room, where Scott would look at him and Stiles would be standing in the rain again. 

It wasn’t so much that it hurt. It wasn’t so much that Scott was wrong. What it was, in that moment, was that in a week, Scott might be right.

“Now, now, sweetheart, I can’t have you stressing your little teenage heart to bursting before I get my due.” 

He spun on his heel, startling and falling back onto the bed. She stood beside his window, as beautiful as she’d been in the dark, a yellow sundress swaying slightly in the breeze. Her eyes, the black of a deep well, were the only thing about her that didn’t look like it belonged. 

“You said a week—”

“And you’ll get your time,” she said. The darkness to her eyes made it impossible to see where she was focusing, what she was looking at, but Stiles had the vague, itching sensation in his skull that she was studying him, the soul of him. 

“Then why are you here?” 

“Because I’ve decided to do you a favor, sweetling. Your power is my power, and I’d like to make the most of our little arrangement.” She drew a small pendant from the air in front of him, black as the ink of her eyes. “You’ve been exposed to the supernatural world around you, had it under your skin. That’s a special kind of touch; it awakens the soul. This will focus it.”

He caught the pendant after she tossed it. The black shine of it seemed to draw his eye. It was simple, obsidian wrapped in silver, the rock inside splintered. 

“Why give this to me?” 

“Because I have plans for you, little mortal, and those plans require you to have some ability to defend yourself. Work on that in the next week. I’ll be in touch.” 

She was gone in the blink of an eye. 

Stiles stood there for several long minutes, staring down at the pendant. The chain was heavy, intricate, the individual loops each engraved with something so small his eyes could barely make out the form. He looped it around his neck, and it was warm against his chest. 

There were times for hesitation, but now, with his soul bought and paid for, wasn’t one of them. The desktop chimed. 

His email box was filled to ridiculousness with solicitation for t-shirts, Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, and half a dozen other sites and selling points. There, just above a subscription email to one of the occult websites he tended to frequent, was an email from an unknown sender. 

He eyed it a moment, critical of anything he didn’t recognize — and wasn’t that a shot to the balls? He’d think twice about opening an email but not about accepting a gift from demons. Curiosity and his need to locate at least one of the Hales won out. 

And paid off. 

The email was empty save for a phone number and the letters SW following them. He considered a moment, tapped the number into his phone, and hit call. The phone rang three times before it picked up. 

“Yeah.” Derek’s voice was rough and familiar, half distracted. 

“Derek,” Stiles said.

“You called me, not the other way around. Who is this?” 

Stiles laughed into the phone, the gruff annoyance in his tone familiar and welcome. 

“Stiles?” 

“Yeah, big guy,” he said. “Did you really sign your email with Sourwolf?” 

“Figured you’d know who it was that way.” He paused. “Is something…” 

“No,” Stiles said. “No. For the first time, man, something’s right. Where are you?” 

“Stiles, go to college. Date some vegan girl who wears polyester. Forget about the—”

“Can your phone accept photos?” he asked, because it was Derek Hale, and the guy occasionally didn’t even have running water.

“Yes.” 

Stiles hung up, jogged down the stairs, and found Erica, Boyd, and Isaac still in the kitchen. He snapped their photo and sent it with a simple header. TAKEN TODAY. 

When his phone didn’t ring right away, he pocketed it and gestured toward the living room. 

“They still in conference?” The trio glanced toward the door, heads cocked sideways in that way werewolves had when trying to listen to something out of the immediate room. 

“Ew,” Erica muttered, and went back to the piece of paper in front of her. 

“Awesome,” Stiles muttered. “What are we working on?” 

“A list of things to catch them up on,” Lydia said simply. She took the paper and in her neat handwriting, wrote: The Tale of the White Knight and His Vassals. 

“Really?” he asked her, voice as thick with sarcasm as he could make it. 

“Really,” she confirmed, and hopped off the stool. “If you aren’t going to explain the world they woke up in—”

“I will explain,” Stiles snapped. “But that world isn’t going to be here, and even if it is, I’m not going to be here, Lydia. You get that? I’m going to—”

“Going to what, Stiles?” she asked, voice razor sharp, a shine to her eye that meant she’d won.

“Going to have shit to do.” 

“You’re always doing something.”

Scott’s voice at the doorway wasn’t unexpected, but the easy, happy-go-lucky tone to it was, after everything, after how they’d left things a couple weeks back.

“Yeah,” Stiles said, staring at the werewolf. Allison was tucked under his arm, smiling and whole and herself. Scott was lax, his arm relaxed and a lazy smile on his face that Stiles hadn’t seen in months, years maybe. It hit him hard, in that moment, right where his ribs met. How much of their lives had been changed? Taken from them and altered that day Stiles had drug Scott into the woods? 

“Did you reach Derek?” Lydia asked, turning her back on the True Alpha, a look of disgust on her face. 

“Talked to him, he didn’t exactly seem happy to hear from me, but I sent him a photo of the Warriors Three over there.” 

“Warriors Three?” 

“Jesus, they missed the Marvel explosion,” Stiles muttered, hand to his heart in sadness. “If he doesn’t get back to me by this evening, I’ll call him again.” 

“Not that all of this isn’t surreal, but should we be worried?” Scott asked, that little frown back between his eyebrows. 

“No,” Chris said, stepping past them into the kitchen. Stiles hopped up on the counter, clearing a space for the man to sit around the table. “I checked it out.” Stiles did not miss the heavy look Chris sent his way. 

“Then this is real? This is permanent?” The happy, playful puppy shining in his eyes, he gave a little whoop and lifted Allison clear from the floor. 

“Why don’t you call the Pack, Scott?” Stiles asked. “Have them meet you at your house, maybe? Introduce everyone? I don’t want some teenage werewolf breaking down the front door because he smelled a threat.” 

“We don’t do that,” Scott said, but he had his phone out anyway. 

“I would have,” Erica quipped. She’d taken a few steps toward where Stiles sat, drawing Isaac and Boyd with her. In the quiet that followed, it was clear that a line had been drawn. Chris sat in the middle, a buoy in the ocean, two continents on either side. 

“I’ll take care of it,” he said. “Let’s head over. My mom’s going to be so happy to see you again.” 

“You go ahead, Scott,” Chris said. “Take the wolves with you. Us humans have a little...recuperating to do.” 

Scott considered Chris for a moment, but nodded. He left the house, the wolves following, Allison under his arm. 

“Apparently, Allison doesn’t qualify as human,” Stiles snickered. It would take an act of God to part the two now. Stiles guiltily wondered if Kira could manage such feats. 

“We need to talk about what’s going to happen,” Chris said evenly. “I’m grateful. You have no idea how grateful, but we have to know what we’re getting into.” 

“Nothing,” Stiles said. 

“Yes, the fact that you’re going to be some crossroads demon’s bitch for the rest of your life is of fleeting importance.” 

“So that’s what you did,” Chris said, settling back against the chair. Critical eyes burned Stiles’ skin as he sat there. 

“You wanted me to pick one of them?” he asked the tile floor. “You wanted me to just pick one and in ten years when the hellhounds started scratching at the door just let them drag me to hell?” 

“You shouldn’t have done any of this.” 

“Like hell I shouldn’t have!” Stiles shouted, coming off the counter and pacing the small kitchen. “It’s my fault!” The bluster went out of him at the shocked expressions on Lydia and Chris’s faces. “It’s my fault. All of this.” 

“Yes, because you’re somehow responsible for every death in Beacon Hills in the last decade.” Lydia was cutting when she was annoyed, and Stiles had managed to press all of her buttons in the last few hours.

“I took Scott into the woods, Lydia. I started this. Are you really going to tell me you could have looked me in the eye the day after Allison died? You going to tell me you didn’t blame me, too?” 

The silence that stretched out in the little kitchen was deafening, and Stiles found himself palming the pendant beneath his shirt. 

“I don’t...I didn’t…” Lydia trailed off. Stiles gave her the best smile he could muster, and glanced to Chris. The man was studiously watching his own fingers trace the grain in the wooden table top. 

“Yeah,” Stiles said, sliding his hands into his pockets. “Chris, why don’t you and Lydia meet up with the pack and get Erica and Boyd sorted. I’m going to try to find their alpha.”

“You should come with us,” Chris said, standing. His chair scraped noisily against the floor. “There’s no telling what this deal attracted.” 

“Crossroads deals generally go unnoticed by the rest of the supernatural world,” Lydia muttered. “They’re fairly common, and as long as they don’t affect anyone directly, no one notices.” 

“Everyone should still—”

“Look, it’s cute,” Stiles said, cutting him off. “It’s cute that you want to try to protect me or keep an eye on me or try and save me from some demonic force, but the facts are the facts. I’ve still got a few days—”

“Five,” Lydia said, voice sharp, calculating. When he looked at her, she’d the odd, thoughtful gaze she always got in high school when a teacher asked a particularly difficult question. “Five days.” She turned on her heel, and left.

“Go with her,” Stiles told Chris. “She’s taking this harder than I am.” 

“Might want to consider why that is,” Chris said, but did as he was bid.

#

There were a lot of things Derek Hale never planned on doing again. It wasn’t as if there was a list in his mind that he’d numerated and put in boldface font. In the last two hours, he’d started a list of things he’d never planned on doing again that he’d done.

One of those things was turn his car West. 

It had been a little over a year since Derek had seen anyone from Beacon Hills, and he couldn’t really say he knew anyone there well. Except, some people you learned through conversation and years of exposure. Some people you met under adversity, when neither of you were at your best, and somehow, through it all, you managed to keep each other alive and whole. 

Derek had learned Stiles Stilinski in that way. His mind, the part of him that was rational and thinking, trusted no one, hadn’t since a blonde-haired, blue-eyed beauty had burned his family to the ground. There was a part of him, though, a part that was instinct and action and heart, that hadn’t trusted anyone more than a lanky, loud-mouthed kid from Beacon Hills. 

Neither part of him thought the kid would take the time out of his day to fabricate a photograph of Isaac — clearly older — with an old photo of Erica and Boyd. Neither part thought he’d want to hurt Derek that badly. 

He’d been in his car before his mind had caught up with his heart, the instinct to find what had been missing from his pack. What was left of his pack. He blinked red eyes out through the windshield against the light of the moon, and sighed. He’d failed so many already, it was a wonder the world kept giving him second chances.

#

There were things that needed doing. Erica and Boyd would need an alpha if he couldn’t find what was left of the Hale pack. Allison probably could have used someone to pull her aside and actually ask her what her death had been, after the end of her life. Chris would need somewhere to stay, Isaac, Erica, Boyd, and Allison, too. Lydia had to be stopped before whatever stray brilliant thought she’d had got her into trouble. 

So, yeah, there were things Stiles should have been doing. Instead, he was kneeling in his attic, his mother’s old photo albums and boxes of loose memorabilia scattered on the floor around him. Dust clung heavy in his nostrils, the failing light dim through the one overhead window. 

These were simple moments, simple memories that there wouldn’t be time to appreciate later. They were important though, important if he was going to hold what was left of his soul together, in the end. 

A photo of his mother, young and beautiful and just about eighteen, smiled up from his lap. He had her eyes, he realized, big, doe-eyes that never seemed to lose their depth. She always looked sad, if he just looked at her eyes, if he ignored the upturn of her lips and the swell of her cheeks.

He knew those eyes, knew them each time he looked in a mirror. Her fair skin was his as well, the pallor that only flushed brilliant and alive when something made it, when the world put its influence into heart and vein and blood. He’d felt like his entire body was like his skin for a while, through grade school and until Peter Hale.

“You up here, kid?” John called from the pull down ladder in the upstairs hallway. 

“Yeah, Dad,” Stiles called back, frowning at the crack in his voice. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

“Take your time.” 

Stiles settled the photographs back into the tub they’d been packed inside and left memory there, in his childhood home, where it would be safe from the coming days. 

#

Derek wasn’t answering his phone. Scott had disappeared with Allison after introducing the two fragments of the same pack. Isaac was taking Erica and Boyd through an impressive marathon of the last year’s movie selections, and Lydia had gone into the ether like so much smoke. 

Which left Stiles to do little more than cold call local veterinarians and see if they had any ties to the Supernatural. It was a long shot, but when he’d asked Deaton, the man had said that emissaries were often veterinarians or park rangers, people with excuses to be called in when something odd happened that might have been animal related. 

So far, he’d been asked not to call back by two or three clinics, ended up hanging up on an overly chatty secretary, and had one decent conversation with a man in Utah that he wasn’t sure of yet.

As the sun set on the third day of his freedom, his hand found the obsidian pendant around his neck, and sleep claimed him. 

#

The drive from St. Louis to Beacon Hills took just under twenty hours. Twenty hours of wide-eyed driving and he was driving through familiar roads, his windows down so the wind would carry in the familiar scent of pack. His nose controlled his hands, his feet, the car blinkers and the gas. 

Erica. 

Boyd. 

Isaac. 

They were all as individual in their scents as their personalities. Fresh and recent and living. The car — an old Chevelle he’d picked up for next to nothing and had spent the summer working toward restoring — idled in the driveway for several long minutes before his legs caught up to this nose. 

His feet were eating up the distance across the yard, his hand closing around the door knob and wrenching it open. Vaguely, he heard the door frame creak and crack beneath the force.

The scent of pack was overwhelming, and in a stuttering step, he was on his knees. 

#

Stiles heard the front door slamming open, heard the splintering of wood, and he was on his feet, storming out of the kitchen ready to rain hellfire onto the head of the wolf that hadn’t taken care enough with the door. 

Except, when he rounded the corner, Derek Hale was kneeling in the entryway, head fallen forward and braced against Erica and Boyd’s shoulders, where they knelt in front of him, scenting and smiling, and holding him upright while Isaac sat just to the side, a smile on his lips.

Stiles smiled, the last day’s worth of anger and anxiety and the feeling of impending doom weighing on his shoulders disappeared. This, he decided, leaning in the doorway to the kitchen, was why he was going to spend the rest of his life as some crossroad demon’s bitch, and this, was worth it.

#

Stiles was in the living room, watching a bad late night B-flick, trying his hardest not to want to return to the hall where the four wolves had seemed unable to move from in the last hour. 

At first, he’d been warm, so very warm and happy at the sight that he’d stood there for several long minutes, watching their reunion with as pure a feeling inside of him as he’d ever had. His hands started itching though, and he wanted to fall to his knees there with them, wanted to run his hand over Erica’s cheek, nudge his shoulder under Isaac’s, grip Boyd’s elbow, lay his forehead against Derek’s.

They were wolf instincts, things he didn’t really have, desires he had no right to be asking for. So, he’d left them there, in the entryway to his home, and settled into the couch. 

“Is there a reason,” John asked, coming in through the back entry. “Is there a reason why there are werewolves cuddling in our front door?”

He was tired, trying for annoyed, but the smile on his face was damning. 

“Let them cuddle,” Stiles said easily. “They deserve it.” 

“One of these days, once this is settled, you’re going to tell me?” John asked, laying a hand against Stiles’s shoulder. 

“Of course, Dad,” he lied. 

It was easy to lie to John. He couldn’t hear the difference. In the end, his father just nodded, settled into the reclining chair, turned on the game, and promptly fell asleep not half an inning in. 

Stiles quieted the sound, lay a blanket across his father’s lap, and retreated to the kitchen. Soon, he figured, he’d have an entire house of rooms he had to avoid to keep the emotion from splashing all over him.

It was a little after two o’clock in the morning, and Stiles was sitting on a stool in the kitchen, drinking his fifth cup of coffee — because the machine makes twelve, he has to drink them — and trying not to fall asleep sitting there.

“I didn’t think anything in the world would get me back to Beacon Hills.”

Stiles startled at the voice, hand spasming on the coffee cup and sending the dark liquid spilling out across the counter. 

“Jesus,” he hissed, grabbing a dishrag to sop up the spill. “Didn’t you learn to not fucking do that while you were gone?” 

He was working on sopping up the mess when the kitchen sink kicked on and off again. A wet washcloth ran along behind his dry, cleaning up the sticky residue from the sugar he dumped into the coffee cup. 

“They said you’d changed,” Derek said, wiping down the last of the table. “Thought you’d be better about…” Derek gestured toward Stiles’s person, as if it spoke enough on its own. 

“There’re three werewolves living on my floor,” Stiles said to the countertop. “Sue me.” He stole the abandoned washrag and scrubbed down the counter again for something to do, something to focus on. 

He might have had too much coffee. 

Which was probably why he was hallucinating the hand that closed around his wrist. 

“Thank you,” Derek said, and Stiles’s head shot up. The wolf was staring at him, expression open and honest, and it almost ruined him. 

“Maybe next time you’ll answer your phone,” Stiles said, if only because he had to spout something or sink into the stool and just stare. 

“Maybe,” Derek said, a smile drawing the corner of his mouth up only briefly before turning back toward the living room. “Four wolves are sleeping on your floor.” 

“Wonderful,” Stiles muttered, tossing both rags into the sink. 

#

Stiles woke with a start halfway through the next afternoon. Glaring at the clock on the kitchen wall, he arched his back, groaning at the snap, crackle, pop that came from falling asleep sitting upright in a kitchen. 

The house was the eerie quiet of a place devoid of any other occupants, and he took a moment to wrap his mind around the course of events. 

It had been four, going on five days since he’d stood at a crossroads in the middle of the night and sold his soul, his life, and his death to a demon. The obsidian pendant around his neck hung heavy and promising. 

He’d managed to cross off his largest tasks before his seven day deadline, and in the quiet, without something to focus on, his mind took to the pendant. 

Obsidian was often considered a grounding stone by those that dabbled, only because it was the color of black earth. Stiles had done more than dabbling; he’d done research into half a hundred different stones, their properties, what they were thought to be capable of doing when imbued with magic and what they were actually capable. 

Obsidian was a stone of two fold, at least in Stiles’s mind. It was a weapon, if encouraged properly, capable of bringing ruinous wounds to even demons, but it was also a healing stone, one that could draw illness and wounds from the flesh. 

It didn’t take a genius to figure out what the demon had wanted him to use it for. The little split-through stone in hand, Stiles closed his palm, focused on a weapon, any weapon, and willed. 

The blade came, wicked and twisted, all obsidian and shining. It was only seven inches long from the guard to the tip of the blade, but it shone with possibility. He pushed, encouraging the blade to stretch, to change. It shivered in his hand, the curling edges to the blade straightening, and it managed to lengthen another few inches. 

“What are you doing?” Lydia’s sharp voice startled him, and he dropped the blade. As it fell to the tabletop, it slid back into the little round stone. 

“If everyone would stop sneaking up on me, I’d be fan-fucking-tastic!” Stiles said, one hand against his throat and the other scrabbling for the stone. 

“Excuse me for worrying about you when you stop answering your phone,” Lydia said, settling her purse onto the table and sliding onto the stool across from him. “Especially considering there are wolves running around the preserve making fools of themselves.”

“Derek’s back. The full moon’s tomorrow night; they’re burning off some steam.” 

“Because we don’t have other things to worry about,” Lydia sniped, glaring at him. She carried a laptop and a notebook, something he hadn’t registered at first. She sat them neatly down on the table, sliding the notebook across to him, and he cracked it open. 

“What is…”

Inside, there were bullet pointed instances of crossroad demon deals, enumerated in Lydia’s perfect script. Page after page rolled on as Stiles flipped through the notebook, ten in all, and he glanced up at Lydia. She sat there, grim faced and waiting for him to make some sort of realization. 

“They’re all finalized,” he said. 

“All but the ones who died before the ten years,” Lydia said. “There was no record of something like you’ve described.” 

“You found all of this in five days?” he asked. 

“Four.”

“You’re something else.” 

“Well, I’ve got to be, don’t I? My best friend keeps throwing himself into situations that make me want to kill him.” 

They sat at the counter after that, silent, as Stiles flipped through the notebook again and Lydia ran fingers over the obsidian stone. 

“It’s from her?” she asked. 

“She seems to want me capable,” he offered, and Lydia nodded. 

“You’ve always been capable.” There was a hoarseness to her voice, a shattered edge that Stiles studiously ignored as Lydia laid the stone down on the notebook and left. 

The wolves didn’t come back until the small hours of the morning, and Stiles was careful to be in his bed before they came through the door. 

#

“Are you going to tell anyone?” Chris asked, words half lost in the mug of coffee he sipped at the kitchen table. 

“Not if I can help it,” Stiles admitted. 

“That’s not going to end well for anyone.”

“It’s not going to end well either way.” 

“Your dad will notice. Even if everyone else leaves. Even if Derek takes the wolves and leaves. Even if Scott comes with us or he’s distracted enough not to notice… You’re father will know his son’s…”

“Turning into something he’d arrest? Yeah, Chris. Got that memo.” 

“You won’t necess—”

“I’m going to be working for a demon for the rest of my life,” Stiles said, acid and hurt in his voice. “I’m going to be exactly what she makes of me. I’m going to...oh, God.” 

He buried his head in his hands, fingers scrabbling at the hair, tugging. He was going to turn into what his father put behind bars, what Chris hunted. He was...a choked little laugh forced its way out of his lungs. 

“I’m going to be what you hunt.” 

“Not necessarily,” Chris said, finishing his earlier thought. “If you’re smart, you might be able to play this along the grey line.” 

“And if I can’t?” Stiles asked, more than the apparent behind the question. 

“I’ll take care of it,” Chris said, jaw set. 

The tension lingering in Stiles’s spine eased, and he slumped to the table top, resting elbows on the wood and head falling between clasping hands. 

“You don’t hunt humans,” Stiles said, but it was a thank-you, an extension of permission. 

“Enough of my family has broken the code for worse things.” 

“You won’t let it get too far?” 

“I’ll keep an eye on you, but I’m going to trust you to let me know.” 

“You won’t tell them?” Stiles asked. “If...you won’t tell them.” 

“No,” Chris said, swallowing a mouthful of bitter coffee. 

#

The sun was setting on the seventh day, and Stiles had managed, for the better part of the last three days, to avoid everyone that might have meant something to him. With five hours left staring him in the face, he’d put his laptop in a backpack, threw in two changes of clothes, assured the obsidian pendant hung around his neck, and for good measure stacked the occult books and odds and ends in the back of the Jeep with the rest. 

Since his talk with Chris, he’d made a decision, one that would probably mean the rest of his years were as fucking miserable as they were supposed to be. 

The Jeep pressed cool against his back as he watched the sun set over a bluff that looked out over the preserve. This had been a refuge in the quiet times of his life where he wanted to do nothing but sit in misery and let the world wash away the sharp edges of his emotions. 

“You’ve been avoiding me.” 

The voice wasn’t unexpected, not out in the preserve, not when Stiles would have done anything but talk to any of the wolves, especially one of the ones that had a handle on their senses. 

“Not you specifically.” 

Derek stood a few feet off, and it was clear from the look on his face that he’d been there a while, watching Stiles watch the world. 

“Why?” 

There was the question, the one that everyone would be asking in the coming weeks—months, if he was lucky. Stiles blew out a long, slow breath and drew in the breath to reply. The words he wanted didn’t come past his lips. 

“You’ve done things you’re not proud of,” he said instead. There was no question there, and Derek didn’t treat it like there was. He didn’t look for an accusation either. Stiles looked away from him to watch the sun sink lower along the horizon, disappearing into the treetops. “You’ve done things you never wanted to do? That someone made you do?” 

The quiet hiss of denim sliding along denim was the only warning that Derek was settling beside him on the ground before a bicep pressed against his own and the warm bar of a thigh pressed against his. 

“The Nogitsune—”

“Jesus, I wish this was the Nogitsune,” Stiles said with a laugh. The thought hadn’t gone unconsidered. The Nogitsune at least had pulled the strings on a puppet. The demon would give a command. Stiles would follow it. 

“You’re not going to tell me?” 

“No.” 

“Then you rebel,” Derek said. They’d come a long way since Derek would have argued the point with him, demanded and commanded. They’d both grown. “You’re good at that.” 

“And if I can’t rebel?” Stiles asked. 

Derek didn’t answer right away, instead he stared out into the coming night. 

“Before I left...before everything, you were my moral compass. There were people that I should have listened to, people who were...better...than either of us, but it was always you I ran through my head. Would Stiles do this? What would he do first? You think your way through problems, but you also think your way around them.” 

Stiles stared, slack jawed at the Alpha beside him. Derek’s face was easy and open and devoid of the lines around his mouth that Stiles had come to associate with lies. 

“If anyone can figure out the best way to do something, the least of two evils...it’s you.” 

“And if I don’t know what to do?” 

“You come talk to me.” Derek finally looked at him, and there was a heavy honesty there. “If we can’t figure out a solution…” He laid a heavy hand against the back of Stiles’s neck and gave him a little shake before standing. 

Stiles watched the last of twilight fade and the moon rise over head. 

Midnight came and midnight went, and Stiles sat on his knees on the bluff, devastation in every line of him. 

“My beautiful little sweetling. The first thing I want you to do, the very next time you see him is tear out your father’s heart.” 

#

Stiles sat at his kitchen table, staring sightlessly down at the obsidian pendant that sat atop the wood grain. He’d spent the better part of the night doing the same, just watching the little fault lines through the stone and wondered if that was his soul now. 

His father’s cruiser pulled into the driveway, the sound of squeaking brakes as familiar as his own voice. 

The front door opened, closed. Boots on a wooden floor. 

“Stiles?” John asked, leaning into the kitchen. He had one eyebrow quirked in question. 

“Sit down,” he said, kicking the chair opposite him out. It screeched in the silence. 

“Is there something I need to be worried about, son?” 

“No.” 

The clock on the wall ticked along, the sound louder than it should be in the kitchen, punctuated with drips from the sink every third second. John shifted his weight once, twice, and he’d opened his mouth to question further when Stiles finally spoke. 

“I’m leaving,” he said, voice as sharp and distant as he could make it. Detachment. Detachment was important now. 

“You taking that trip up to—”

“No, John,” Stiles said, the first name poison on his tongue. “I’m leaving. This town...these people. They’ve taken enough from me.”

“Stiles—”

“You’ve taken enough from me, don’t you think?” His tongue was sharp, his voice acrid and pointed. The words were chosen to do harm, to cut and maim and rend the delicate flesh in his father’s chest. 

“If anyone can figure out the best way to do something, the least of two evils...it’s you.” 

Derek’s words echoed in his head, drowning out whatever his father was saying. Had the wolf been right? How could Stiles out of anyone in the world, how could he be trusted to know what was best? How could he—

Oh, God, how could he? How could he have… and his father had been right there, devastation and guilt and betrayal all on his face, and Stiles and… he’d let him. He’d made him think. 

Nausea rose up in his throat, and he staggered off the chair, heaving into the sink, empty stomach refusing to give up even bile. 

“Now, now, sweetling.” The demon’s voice was sweet and coy in his ear her breath on the pillar of his neck. Her hand ran from the base of his spine upward, massaging and soothing, until her fingertips stopped at the base of his skull. 

A terrible, rending pain lanced through his mind, and he was gone. The kitchen counter disappearing from beneath his elbows, the tile from his feet. 

He tried to straighten, to turn and take stock, but his eyes found nothing but inky blackness, his limbs bound out by something rough, abrasive around wrists and ankles. 

“You knew, didn’t you, sweetling? You knew what would happen if you failed me. Your soul belongs to me, and your soul is the only thing that’s going to matter by the end of this.” 

“I’m not going to—”

“You’re going to do whatever I ask you to do, because you, as you so eloquently put it, are my pawn in the coming war.” 

There was no sight, no sound other than her voice. There was no scent or feeling other than a sickly sweet perfume she wore and her fingers tracing patterns on his shoulder, through the thin cotton of his t-shirt. 

“You’re so good at talking your way out of things. Did you think you’d talk me out of what I wanted?” Her fingertips caught at the neck of his collar, scraping nails into the delicate skin. 

“No,” he said, honesty ripped from his throat. 

“Good boy.” Something thin and cold drew down the middle of his chest, a chill following it as his shirt split away and a slow swelling of warmth that slipped down his stomach and soaked into the waist of his jeans. The pain was slow and sweet, almost mild where the knife cut into him. “I don’t like marring things that are mine, sweetling, not when I can look at them, not when they’re as pretty as your little face. But I am going to hurt you, if you don’t behave for me, next time.” 

A flash of something in the darkness, and he was screaming, the line she’d cut down his chest searing into him, through his insides and his back, bringing sweat to his temples and sapping the strength from his legs. 

He fell, sagging against the restraints around his wrists, delicious, biting pain lancing through there and slick warmth rolling down to his elbows. 

The screaming stopped, some unknown amount of time later, when his throat stopped spasming around choking sobs. She was gone, and he was kneeling in his father’s kitchen, blood dripping into the tile. The wound on his chest was closed, but the skin was smeared with red where his hands had clasped, trying to quell the pain. 

He collapsed forward, catching himself on his hands, and panted into the cool morning air. A smile quirked the corner of his mouth. 

He’d disobeyed. He’d bled. She’d not commanded him again. The smile turned into a pained, aching laugh.

#

“Stiles!” A strong hand found his shoulder, heaving him up to his knees, but the laughter didn’t stop. Questing fingers slid through the bloody mess of his chest, looking for a wound that had disappeared to nothing but scarring. Another, more petite hand slid up his back. 

Even with eyes closed, he could make out Derek and Lydia, even without looking at them, without feeling the damnation he should, he knew. 

“Stiles, open your eyes for me,” Lydia commanded, and when her hand found his chin, it was wet with his blood. He blinked at her concerned face, laughter still leaving him in heaves and gullies. 

“Stiles?” Derek asked, shaking his shoulder gently, like he was afraid there was some wound he couldn’t see. 

“I thought my way around a problem, Derek, and it made me the worst piece of shit to ever walk the earth.” He’d known terrible people, terrible men and women and monsters, and yet… the look on his father’s face… Hysterical laughter hiccuped into sobs.

“Come on,” Lydia murmured, brushing hair from his eyes. “Let’s get you off the floor.” 

“Out,” Stiles requested. “The Jeep? Can we go to the Jeep?” 

“Sure,” she said, soft and gentle, and he didn’t deserve any of it as they heaved him to his feet. His toes slid in blood, and he glanced down at the kitchen tile, smeared with the claret splash from some otherworld. “Are you alright to stand?” 

“Fine,” he said, pushing against the hands at his elbows, his forearms. He’d taken two steps before he was dizzy, but the wall could hold him up, keeping him going as straight, as any grasping hands. 

Outside, he couldn’t keep walking and collapsed into a heap in the grass. Lydia had a t-shirt in her hands when she found him a moment later, Derek stalking around from behind the house, like he’d been looking for something and couldn’t find it. 

“Your father smells like a brewery,” Derek groused, settling in the grass. “But there’s nothing else here. What happened?” 

“You’re going to watch for him, right Lyds?” Stiles asked, ignoring the sharp looks Derek sent him when he didn’t answer. 

“Of course,” she agreed, nodding. “You didn’t do what she wanted?” 

He smiled, something sharp and feral and so very much the last scrap of good in him that it ached. 

“I did,” he amended. “But not the way she wanted.” 

“Who?” Derek asked, command lacing the word. When Stiles looked at him, the alpha was on his feet, shoulders drawn tight like he was ready for a fight, ready to go to war for Stiles of all people. 

And he would. Stiles realized in that moment. He would go to war for him, they all would, and they’d all die.

“I’ve got to go,” Stiles said, panic rising in him. She hadn’t demanded he take his father’s life again, hadn’t cemented the order, but if he stayed… If he stayed and he did something worse...

“You’re not doing this alone,” Lydia said. 

“Yes, I am.” 

“Like hell you’re going anywhere—”

“Derek,” Lydia said, voice sharp and cutting. The wolf went still and silent, eyes darting between Lydia and Stiles as if searching for something. Stiles couldn’t hold the weight of those eyes. 

His head protested standing; his whole body protested standing, but stand he did. The world only tipped a little as he climbed into the Jeep, pushed the key into the ignition, and backed out of the drive. 

When he was too weak to not look into the rearview mirror, he saw Derek and Lydia standing in the middle of the street, staring after him. Derek was half a pace in front of Lydia, small and blonde, with her hand at his elbow, stronger in her own way than a wolf. Stronger than a boy that couldn’t let the dead rest. 

“I’m going to hell,” he muttered, and a cool, chiming laugh echoed in the back of his mind.


	2. Chapter 2

Stiles stood in front of an old brick church, bright red door standing twice his height in the moonlight. It was a small town Catholic church, but the engraved sign out front proclaimed it the seat of one of the first Christian towns that sprang up in Illinois. 

There were maybe two-hundred people living in the little village, all snug in their beds at two in the morning, and Stiles? Stiles was standing on the cement stair just in front of the door, obsidian blade in hand. 

The command, her second command, was easy enough. The memory of that other place, where he’d been cut open and returned whole but bloody, was sharp enough in his mind that he didn’t see the need to argue this time. 

It was a door. It was just a little blood. 

The wicked edge of the dagger cut into his palm, and bright red blood welled up, tracing the palmar lines until his cupped hand was full. Blood spattered over the edge to the cement, and Stiles hesitated just a moment. 

A dog barked somewhere in the shadow, and he brought his hand forward, wincing at the bite of wood against the wound, and smeared. The blood looked like wet paint in the moonlight when he was done.

When he turned away, the demon stood there, smiling at him, sharp and pleased. He couldn’t figure out why. 

#

Lydia winced as she shoved the Stilinski door open. The stringent smell of whiskey bit at her nose as she hung her bag on the empty coat rack. 

The cruiser was still out front, damning all on its own. John had missed three days of work already, and by hell or high water, Lydia was going to see this was the last day. 

She’d promised, afterall. 

The kitchen was as she remembered, though her mind would probably never stop showing her Stiles, curled in around his chest, blood like a splash around him, pooling around his hands and knees where he braced himself. 

She shook her head, redirected, her focus, and found John glaring at her over the rim of a bottle of Jack Daniels. 

“Oh, John, if you’re going to drink, at least don’t drink that,” she said, side stepping a shattered glass on the floor. She’d dropped it, not thrown it. There was no tell tale marks against the walls, no great spread from the velocity. Just a slip of the hand. 

Just a slip of the hand, and that glass had fallen to the ground, shattered. Like John was, sitting there, hair a mess, unwashed uniform stained. 

“Come on,” she commanded, hands on her hips. “First you need a shower.” 

“I don’t need—”

“I understand you don’t know me, Mr. Stilinski, but your son knew enough not to argue. Up. Shower.” 

If thirty minutes later, John was still drunk, hair wet and eyes red rimmed from alcohol or tears, no one needed to know. No one needed to know the red of Lydia’s eyes, either. 

#

“Listen,” Stiles said, hands gesturing wildly as he spoke despite the iron fireplace poker in his left and a jar of salt in his right. “All I’m saying is that he ruined your life; why are you letting him keep you from what could be beyond this house?” 

The spirit he was speaking to — and wasn’t that a kick in the spleen — was a seventeen year old boy named Erik Neams. Erik had been killed by a father that had spent his life tormenting his wife and son until the woman had lost her mind, killed her son and then herself, but not until after she’d set the house on fire. 

There was only so much torment you could watch, Stiles supposed. Still, the spirit had blamed his father, not his mother, and so Stiles was sitting on the burned out wreckage of a staircase, running his mouth as the boy stared at him, wide eyed. 

“She’s probably waiting for you, did all she could to get you someplace where this house wasn’t all you knew, and what are you doing? Wasting that?” Stiles went on, gesticulating with the end of the poker. “If I had a chance to see my mom again? You’d bet your ghostly ass I’d be —”

He didn’t have to say more, in the end, because the boy’s face had crumbled to nothingness, and then a wave of light had engulfed him so fine and clear that Stiles had shielded his eyes. 

When he’d brought his hand down, it wasn’t the Neams home he was seeing, it was that other world, and the demon who had taken him there. 

She was different here, beautiful but burning, bits of flesh gone and left as little, charred expanses of nothingness. Her hand came out, those delicate fingers turning to claws blackened like onyx, and raked down his throat. 

He screamed, pain and fear rising in him sharp and strong, blood warm as it ran down over his chest. The scream was garbled at ruined, her fingers cutting deep enough to tear through his voice box. 

“A reminder, sweetling, that I don’t expect that slick little tongue of yours to do the work for you.”

A moment later, and they were in the house, his screams still coming, hoarse but whole. His throat was bloody, but the wounds were gone. She kissed him, hard and biting, and he’d tasted ash in her wake. 

#

Derek Hale was not someone that faced his problems head on. He was a man that had been taught as a child that running was often times more beneficial than standing his ground and fighting. 

Except in the past, his running had ended up with two dead packs, and he liked to think he’d grown in the last few years. 

Getting Erica and Boyd back, getting a second chance to be the alpha they deserved? That had been a blessing, a blessing that had ended with one of the most constant people in his life disappearing from it. 

Which really, was what had him pausing outside of Lydia Martin’s home, considering his life choices. Stiles Stilinski was one of the most stalwart people in his life, and he hadn’t even seen the boy in years. 

He blew out a breath and pressed the doorbell. 

Lydia answered a few long minutes later, a frown on her lips and bags beneath her eyes. She looked tired, which was remarkable, considering how put together she’d always been when he’d seen her in the past. 

“What?” she asked, tone sharp. 

“I need to know what’s going on,” he said, squaring his jaw for an argument. She considered him a long moment, looked him up and down from his boots to the tips of his hair and back again. It should have made him feel exposed, vulnerable, had in the past when other women had done it. With her, it felt assessing, but critically, not appreciatively. 

“Maybe,” she said, stepping aside and letting him into the house. “We’re going to need tea.” 

He just nodded, followed her into the kitchen, and watched her move around the white countertops and cabinets. It was clinically clean, fresh and careful. She found tea in a cubby beside the kettle. The mugs were just opposite. 

Everything has a place, and everything in its place. 

He shuttered and drew himself from the memory of his mother, standing in his room, gesturing at the mess. 

“Green, white, or black?” she asked, arching an eyebrow at him. His confusion must have translated onto his face, because she only turned away from him. 

Later, sitting on one of the perfect white stools, careful of his shoes and where his arms touched the counter, Derek sipped at a hot, vaguely pale-green and brown mixture. 

“White tea,” she offered with a sniff at her own cup. “Good for the cardiovascular system.” 

“I’m a werewolf,” Derek said, but drank the tea. The warmth was comforting, and as they sat there in silence, he found the eagerness to be away from the clinical clean settling. 

“Stiles made a deal to get Allison, Erica, and Boyd back,” she said finally, glaring at the bottom of her cup. 

“What kind of deal?” he asked, and then thought better of the question. “You can make deals to...resurrect people?” 

The possibilities were endless, screaming through his mind — Laura, Mom, Dad — Christ, his entire family could have been —

“Yes, you can, but it’s never as simple as you think it’s going to be.” She set the cup down on the counter with a click, and just like that, he was trapped in the sharp stare of a woman deciding if he was enough for something. 

“So, what went wrong?” he asked. “Stiles comes up with plans that are...unconventional, but they usually work.”

“It did work,” she said with a scoff. “It worked exactly as he planned.” 

The weight of that hung in the air. 

“There are demons specifically for making deals with humans,” Lydia offered. “They’re known as crossroads demons, because you summon one by burying a box at a crossroads.”

“Just a box?” Derek asked. “Any crossroads?”

“There are...ingredients, simple things in the grand scheme of things.” She paused and drew a breath. “It doesn’t really matter, what matters is that there are costs, and usually, the highest price you can ask for is another life. One other life.” 

“And what does that life cost?” 

“Your life,” Lydia said, and there were tears in her eyes, not yet visible, but his nose picked them up as she stared into the cup. “Usually, your life and your soul belong to the demon ten years after the deal is made.”

“It hasn’t been ten years,” Derek said, a thrill of terror rising in his gut, a flare of something hot and shivery that made his fingernails itch. “And it wasn’t one person.” 

Lydia didn’t answer, didn’t give voice to either his fear or his words. They sat like that for a long while, that little shiver rising until he could feel it up and down his spine. 

“Is he dead?” Derek asked, carefully watching her face. For a girl, a human girl, she was very good at keeping her features schooled. Her scent, on the other hand, was impossible to cover. 

Lydia smelled like strawberries and rain at the core of her, with punches of cinnamon and sage and cold as her emotion changed. That cold, clean smell was stronger the longer she stayed quiet. 

“No,” she said, after a moment, like she was debating with herself. “He’s not dead. I think I would know, if he died.” 

“Then where is he?” 

“For three souls, he’s...indentured? He’s working for the crossroads demon that raised them.” 

At first, he didn’t understand the fear in her, the anger and flare of something other he couldn’t place. He’d work for the demon, he’d do his time and then…

“Until when?” he asked, but he already knew the answer. Already knew that Stiles would live and die working for the creature that brought his pack back to him. “Doing what?” 

“Whatever she wants,” Lydia said after taking a long, steadying breath. “I spoke with Chris. He’s going to...watch for him? Stiles made him promise to kill him if he started crossing lines.” 

“Stiles wouldn’t…” he trailed off. “Stiles would, and Chris would.” 

“They would.”

“What do we do?” 

“We take care of John,” Lydia said, standing and taking both of their cups. “We take care of what Stiles would want seen to: his dad, the pack...all of us.” 

Derek swallowed down the biles rising in the back of his throat. He could do that. 

#

Stiles fiddled with the stone around his neck. The demon had claimed the magic of the stone would amplify his own, making the cameras of the museum around him useless as far as he was concerned. 

He wasn’t sure how much he believed it, but still, he’d walked through the front door and clear through to the back of the museum without the sounding of some alarm or another. 

The tablet was simple stone, grey and engraved with words that had long since worn away. It wasn’t even behind glass, just laying on a display table. 

He reached out, took the stone slate, and slipped it into the bag on his back. It was that easy, and he felt a vague flare of adrenaline as he walked back out the front door. 

For three blocks, he looked over his shoulder, clutching that pendant. He didn’t breathe until he was in his hotel room, sitting on the bed and staring down at the backpack at his feet. 

“You did such a good job,” came a purring voice from behind him. He startled, nearly kicked the bag over, and pivoted. 

She was laid out at the head of the bed, a pale pink slip covering just the top of her thighs to her breasts. He blinked at her for a moment, so startled in the softness to her appearance that he didn’t recognize what she was until she flashed red eyes at him. 

“This thing worked?” he asked, gesturing toward the pendant.

“Of course it did. You’re of no use to me in a mortal jail.” She rose up on her knees, prowling toward him with a slink to her spine that made his skin crawl. 

“Here,” he said, taking the strap of the bag and tossing it toward her. She caught it with a deft hand and smiled at him. In a blink, the bag was gone, and she was on her knees in front of him, running blunt nails down his thighs. 

“Good boy,” she said, rising up and tugging his chin toward her, kissing him deep and wet and filthy. 

By the time his hands had come up to push her away, she was gone, her laugh lingering in his ears. 

#

Derek sighed, running a hand over his face as he climbed the stairs to the Stilinski second floor. Lydia was downstairs, starting the coffee, pouring the last of the previous night’s alcohol down the kitchen sink. By the time he muscled John from the bed and tossed him into the shower, Lydia would be starting breakfast. 

This was the fifth time Derek had wrangled a struggling, hungover John into the shower, and it didn’t get any easier with experience. John seemed to find new slanderous venom to spit at him. 

“Why the fuck do you care?” he asked, struggling against the arm across his chest. “Leave me the fuck alone and go play with your dogs!”

Derek just sighed, braced the man’s hands against his sides, and reached into the shower to adjust the water. John struggled until Derek dumped him into the shower in his clothes. 

After he was already awake and wet, he seemed to come back to himself, but he never apologised, not to Derek or Lydia, who bore the brunt of his grief after. She, at least, didn’t get the names and the venom. John saved his tears and his hiccuping questions for her.

Derek preferred his slurs and elbows.

#

The cardiac monitor had been silenced so that the intermittent alarms and the rhythmic blip of the boy’s heart didn’t keep him from sleeping. It was dark out the wide, picture window in the pediatric ICU room, and even the hallway lights outside had been dimmed. 

Flowers and small animals decorated the walls and ceiling tiles, and Stiles hated the happy-go-lucky decoration. It was a lie, and all the children in those beds knew it. It was a lie for the parents, a pleasant mask to the reality. 

The boy laying on the bed was four years old, would be five in two months, but he wouldn’t make it that far. He needed a heart transplant, needed it viciously, but his blood type and the infection in his blood wouldn’t allow it. The boy’s heart had stopped three times the day before, and modern medicine had taken into its hands to change what the gods declared. Epinephrine and compressions and the modern medicine of man. 

The boy was awake when Stiles walked through the door, black clad and sneaking past orderlies and nurses alike. He’d held up a grocery bag and smiled. 

“You like Reese’s or Twix?” he asked, the a tired little smile opened up on the boy’s face. 

“KitKat,” he said, and Stiles rummaged into the bag, pulling out a King-Size KitKat and tossing it toward him. 

“How’d you get this?” the boy asked, ripping into the bar with more energy than he should have had. Excitement would do that for you.

“Magic,” he offered, wafting his hands in the air. “What’s your name?” 

“Josh,” he said, chocolate and wafer sprouting from his lips. “Was’yours?”

“Stiles. Can I sit?” he gestured toward the dinosaur shaped chair in the corner. 

“It’s a bad chair,” Josh said, and pointed to the foot of his bed. “Why’re you here? Everyone’s supposed to go home.” 

“I heard you had a bad day, came to see how you felt about it.” Stiles hitched his leg up onto the bed, sitting with the bag of treats between them. He fished out a Reese’s and started eating. 

“My chest hurts,” he said with a shrug, like it wasn’t a big deal anymore. “Mom says it’ll stop when my blood gets better.” The boy took a vicious bite from his KitKat. 

“Moms do that,” Stiles offered with a shrug. “It makes them feel better.” 

“My blood isn’t getting better,” the boy said after a few minutes.

“How do you know?” 

“I can’t play with Katie anymore,” he said, as if it was a secret. “She’s across the hall, but if I get out of bed, my chest hurts, and I go to sleep. When I wake up, Mom’s crying.” 

“Do you want to keep trying?” Stiles asked, voice carefully even. 

Josh didn’t answer, just kept eating his way through the bag of snacks. Two hours later, the boy dozing in and out, Stiles blew out a breath and asked again. 

“Do you want to keep trying?”

“No,” Josh whispered, rubbing his tears into his pillow. “I want to go see Dad.”

Stiles paused, leaning close to hear. “Where’s your dad?”

“His blood didn’t get better either.” The boy pressed his face into the pillow and slept. 

Stiles stood there, watching him sleep, for several long minutes. Little pained murmurs slipped past his lips as he shifted in his sleep. In the pale overhead light, it was difficult, but not impossible, to see the bruising along his chest where the compressions had been done. 

Carefully, Stiles took the extra pillow off of the corner chair. He discontinued the alarm on the monitor and shut it down, and with as much care as he could manage, he pressed the pillow to the boy’s face. 

Hours later, he knelt on a no-tell-motel carpeted floor, shirt off and lost in the room somewhere around him. 

“More,” he whispered, the word falling off his lips again.

A low chuckle ghosted against his neck, warm and wet as lips skimmed up toward his ear. Cherry red lips closed around his earlobe, and at the same time, four sharp lines of pain ran down his flank from his scapula to the base of his spine. 

White hot pain lit along the same path, eased by the warm, wet drip of blood. It ran until it soaked into the waistband of his jeans. Slowly, the warm cooled, the sharp sting disappeared, and he was asking again. 

She slipped around in front of him, ducking down to lick along a cut she’d left low on his belly until she was mouthing at the buckle of his jeans. Sweet, cutting pain raked down his thigh, a single line, sharper and deeper than her nails. Stiles caught the flash of metal off of the knife before he swallowed against the pain. 

It lasted longer, hurt more as she dug her fingers into the wound, but eventually, that too became distant and vague. Her fingers became softer, tracing up his hips, delicate and teasing. 

“Fucking hurt me,” he hissed through his teeth. 

Her laughter came sharp and quick as she gouged her nails through his jeans, deep and long along his hips. 

#

Derek stood in the door of the house he’d bought just outside of Beacon Hills proper. He leaned into the door jam, smiling as he watched Lydia and Allison paint the entryway a cornflower blue that made them both smile. 

He didn’t mind the color, but more importantly, he didn’t mind the open concept, the finished basement, and the six bedrooms that a pack, a healthy pack, could grow into. 

“Where’s the rest?” he asked, eyeing a splotch on the wall Lydia had missed. 

“Painting bedrooms,” Lydia said with a smile. She ran the roller against the wall again, careful to not go over the mistake. Derek watched for a few minutes until a smile bloomed over Ali’s face and Lydia smirked at him. 

With a roll of his eyes, he gripped her hand around the roller, leaned in just enough to reach, and went over the spot three times before he was happy. Her hand beneath his was warm, smooth, and he didn’t feel that familiar crawl when his skin had touched someone else’s in the past.

When he finally let her hand go, Lydia was smiling up at him, and he had a moment, just a splinter of a moment to realize how close they were before she pressed a cornflower blue hand into his face. 

He dropped the roller, hands coming up to capture her wrist, but she was laughing and squirming away from him as another hand with calloused, archer’s fingers came down across the back of his neck. 

Moments later, there were green and yellow and grey splotches and hand prints coming down on his shoulders and Lydia’s hair and Allison’s hip, across Boyd’s back and Isaac’s chest, and one very delicate hand print right across Erica’s left boob. 

By the end of the day, the bedrooms were painted, the entryway that delicate cornflower blue. Halfway up the wall, six hand prints in various colors were grouped together. 

He felt guilty when he stood there the next morning, looking at those handprints. This was his life, his life on the upswing, and it was paid for with the suffering of someone he cared about. 

That night, he stood in the entryway and with careful, deft strokes, painted the outline of a hand, a black band around a white void. 

#

“Such a beautiful little mortal,” she purred in his ear, licking a stripe up the side of his throat, over her scars. “You’ve been such a good little boy for me. They say confidence is the most attractive quality in a man, but do you know what I think, sweetling?” 

“No,” he said, leaning away from her lips as she pressed them into his shoulder. Her hands came up, anchoring him in place as she smirked into skin. 

“Competence will get me wetter every time, and do you know what you are, sweetling?” He didn’t respond, didn’t have to as she snatced his fingers and pressed them against the belly of the woman she’d taken, lower and lower until his fingers slipped and slid. “Competent.” 

He jerked his hand back, the press of her fingerprints burning his skin. She let him go, a laugh echoing in the air as she disappeared. 

In a motel on the side of Route 66, he scrubbed his hand in a bathroom sink until his fingers bled. 

#

In a roadside diner in the middle of nowhere, Stiles sank into the bench seat of a booth, grimacing at an ache in his hip where a demon had taken a swipe at him before he’d been able to put it down. 

The long, tapering slices over the bruising had been his punishment, and they pulled and caught as he moved. 

Chris Argent sat in the seat across from him, eyes critical and watching. He pushed a beer across the table top, and Stiles took a long drink. 

“I didn’t plan on letting you go six months before touching base,” Chris said, voice laced with disappointment. 

“I didn’t know it would be safe until now.” 

“You’re alright?”

“No.” He took a shaking breath. “Beacon Hills?” 

“The pack think you’re on a road trip. Derek and Lydia are taking care of John. They were...considering coming to find you.” 

“They can’t,” Stiles said, panic creeping into his voice. “If she—”

“They thought about it, haven’t tried. The demon’s keeping you hidden.” 

“Throw them off, get them to stop, I don’t care,” Stiles said, pushing out of the booth. “You do this for me, Chris, please.” 

“I’m more concerned about the fact that you can’t sit still for five minutes.” 

“I haven’t even slept for five minutes in the last six months,” Stiles countered, and shook out his hands. “Tell them to stop looking. If...if it gets any worse, Chris, you’re going to put a bullet to me, right? You’re going to follow your code?” 

“Yeah, kid,” Chris said, and Stiles left him sitting there, in the booth of a roadside diner with a half drank beer. 

#

Derek sat in the driver’s seat of the Chevelle, laying on the horn in front of the Martin residence. It had been six months since they’d started playing house in Beacon Hills. It was as close as he could come to describing what they’d been doing. 

John went with little protest now, did little but glare at the pair of them until he got into the cruiser and went to work. Lydia took him lunch. Derek made sure he ate dinner. 

Normally, Lydia came out when she saw the Chevelle pull into the drive, but he’d honked twice since. She still didn’t come outside. 

“Come on, Lydia,” he murmured, glancing toward the house, the door and windows. Nothing was out of place. There was no sign of trouble. It didn’t stop him from wondering at her absence. It didn’t stop the fear in him that he’d lost another pack member, that something had gone wrong. 

“If you’re just doing your hair…” he muttered, killing the engine and walking toward the house. 

Lydia had given the members of the pack a key to use in case of emergencies, and when no one answered after he rang the doorbell, he figured it counted. The house was as normal as ever. There were no unusual smells, no scents that made his hair stand on end. 

Allison was thick in the air, but she normally was. The only thing that made him pause in the doorway was the smell of aftershave and gunoil. Chris Argent was not often at the pack house, but it shouldn’t have put him on edge. 

He found them all sitting in the formal dining room. Allison and Lydia had empty cups of tea in front of them, both looking worriedly between themselves and Chris, who looked up at Derek like he was almost glad for the interruption. 

“What’s going on?” Derek asked, hesitating in the doorway. 

“Sit down,” Chris said, jerking his chin toward a chair. Derek did as he was told. “We’ve got a problem.” 

“John’s going to be late,” Derek said, cutting a look to Lydia, who only tapped a fingernail against the rim of her tea cup. 

“He’s going to be more than late,” Chris said, running hands over his face. “I met with Stiles a few days ago.” 

“You did what?” Lydia asked, voice rising on the question, sharp and dangerous. Her finger tapping stilled, and the room went silent. 

“He sent me a text, asked me to meet with him,” Chris said, watching the grain in the table. “We agreed, before he left...well, you know what we agreed.” 

“What?” Allison asked, eyes focused and sharp on her father. 

“Stiles asked him to put him down if the demon made him do anything out of line,” Derek said, and he watched slow horror cross her face. 

“Demon? He’s working for the crossroads demon?” She paused, drew a quick little breath. “Of course he is, three of us, and that’s never been done before.” She looked away from her father, eyes flickering back and forth like she was trying to read something in the air that wasn’t there. “You killed him?” 

“No!” Chris said, sharp and sure. “No, but maybe...maybe we should be considering it.” 

“Maybe we should be considering killing my best friend?” Lydia asked, careful edge to her tone. “Considering killing the man that brought your daughter back to you? That reunited a pack? Tell me, Chris, what could Stiles have done that we should be contemplating his death?” 

“He didn’t have to tell me what he did,” Chris said, head still down. “He looks like someone needs killing.”

Derek didn’t ask, couldn’t ask, because he knew that look, knew how you could look at someone and think they’d be better off dead. Stiles, full of life and energy and easy smiles? That Stiles? Derek couldn’t imagine a world where he looked at Stiles Stilinski and thought he’d be better off dead. 

“Kid couldn’t sit still long enough to finish half a beer, looked like he was afraid to blink,” Chris trailed off, eyes sliding to Lydia and Allison. “I told him you were wanting to track him down; he made me promise to get you to stop.” 

“You think he’d be better off?” Derek asked. There was a flickering of betrayal across Lydia’s face, something disappointed and raw, and Derek held her gaze, made himself see the pain there. 

“Yes,” Chris said simply. 

“Then we find him, we kill the demon, and we bring him home.” 

Betrayal warped to admiration, hope, and something that made the warm, curling part of him shine. 

 

#

Stiles crouched at the window of an old two story farmhouse, watching some fifteen men and women inside, laughing and roughhousing. He’d been watching them for an hour, and the longer he watched, the more and more he felt like he was about to let the demon rip him apart before he followed this order. 

He was just about to break the mountain ash barrier around the foundation when he heard it, an uptick in the laughter, a mania to the relaxed playfulness. 

A man in his late twenties came through from the basement door, dragging a screaming woman behind him. She was young, twenties maybe, with gold hair to her naked hips and pale honey and milk skin. 

The woman pleaded, but he couldn’t make out the words, just her voice raised in panic. The men and woman reached out, touching and prodding, gentle at first, but growing in their strength. 

The first time one of them shoved hard enough to knock her down, the entire group froze, feral and focused. A moment later, Stiles was watching them tear her apart with teeth and claws. 

The humanity was gone, the girl was dead, and just like that, he was dropping the lighter into the accelerant he’d dumped into the crawlspace. 

“Burn them to the ground,” the demon said.

He’d not wanted to, hadn’t wanted to kill someone, to put someone through something that had turned his blood to boil and his stomach in knots when it had happened to Derek. Except Derek had never torn a girl to pieces in his living room. 

The house went up quickly, as most old farmhouses were wont to do when put to flame. He stood there, watching as the building came down around them, as people were reduced to nothing more than charred remnants. 

It didn’t matter; Pack was the only thing he could see. 

Erica dying with the twisted obsidian dagger through her throat. Isaac snarling from behind a mountain ash barrier, fire licking up his back. Boyd trying to shield Allison and Lydia from the flame with his own body. Derek, Jesus, Derek on his knees in the flame, letting it eat him alive. 

Derek, who would open Alpha red eyes, spring toward him, and bury claws into his gut, tearing clean across and spilling his intestines. The world came back to Stiles at that sharp, searing pain. The wolf in front of him was untouched by the flame, a late comer, Stiles realized. The obsidian blade found his hand and then found the wolf’s throat. 

The house burned behind him as he walked away, hand holding in his intestines. 

#

“Don’t worry about it, Chris,” Stiles said, laying in the back of his Jeep, burner phone pressed between his ear and shoulder. 

“Stiles?” 

“For a little while.” He chuckled, wincing at the bubbling of the blood beneath his hand. He wasn’t a medic, knew nothing about wounds, but bubbling sensations couldn’t be good. 

“You don’t sound…”

“Yeah,” he murmured, pressing down harder against the wound. “Hell’s coming early this year.” 

“Kid—”

“Tell my dad I’m sorry,” he said, eyes pressed shut. “Tell him...tell him if you think it’ll help. It’s alright now.” 

“Tell me where you are.” Chris sounded panicked, and that almost made Stiles feel comforted, like there was someone out there that would miss him. “Come on, kid, just tell me where you are and someone will come get you.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Stiles drew a breath, feeling his heartbeat slowly increasing as it fought to keep his blood pressure up. “Just...only if you think it’ll help. Tell them only if you think it’ll help.” 

He snapped the flip phone shut and tossed it to the seat behind him. Eyes closed, he willed his heart to slow, his breathing to go gentle and even. The quiet of the night was soothing as he lay there. 

“A one year return on my investment is hardly acceptable.” Her voice was in his ear, and he startled as her hand closed around his abdomen, low and searing, and he screamed. 

He woke in darkness, hands bound again, fingers ghosting along the line of his spine from the nape of his neck down and down and down until they skittered along the swell of his ass and lower, pressing against him sudden and fierce, and he jerked away. 

Her laughter danced in his ear and a warm, wet tongue ran along the shell, quick and light. 

“You didn’t think I’d let you out of this so easily?” she asked, pressing firm against the line of his back. Skin slid against skin, naked and firm and her hands slid around his hips, gripping tight and digging fingernails in deep until blood welled and slipped down his bare thighs. 

“I’d hoped,” he admitted, and her laugh came again. 

“Oh, sweetling, when are you going to give up on that?” One of her hands creeped forward, fingerpads skimming along his hip and down, playing with the hair just below his stomach. 

“I’ve never given up in my life,” he muttered, and a moment later, the words sparked something low in his chest. He hadn’t. Not like this. Not compliant and loose and letting her…

Those fingers danced downward, running along the base of his dick and down, cupping his balls quick and delicate before gripping him hard and firm and pumping him dry. Once, twice, her hand worked over him, and he flinched against the invisible restraints keeping his hands and legs spread. 

“Stop,” he hissed, voice low and aching, blood throbbing in his throat like it did lower. “Stop.” 

Her hands disappeared from him, and she leaned into him, biting his ear hard enough to break skin. The blood trickled down, caught on the lobe and dripped off onto his shoulder. 

“That, is not a good boy,” she said, and searing, tearing pain lanced down his back. 

#

Derek woke to a pounding on his bedroom door, quick and viscous and accompanied with terrible, wrenching sobs. He was off the bed, ears taking in the tone, the cadence, nose sniffing out cinnamon and clove that meant Allison. 

He wrenched the door open, catching her hand when it came down again to beat against the door. 

“What’s wrong?” 

“Stiles called Dad,” she sobbed. “He’s got a location off the phone.” 

“What’s wrong?” he asked again, guiding the girl toward the stairs.

“He was saying goodbye. He can’t be saying goodbye, Derek. Not when it’s our fault, not when we didn’t look soon enough.” 

“Where?” he asked, hesitating only long enough to hear her. 

“New Mexico,” she said, and he was leaping down the stairs. He heard more footsteps behind him, coming down the stairs quicker than human speed. 

Erica, Boyd, and Isaac were with him in the car when he spun the wheels off the gravel drive. Two text messages came in on his phone ten minutes later — the GPS coordinates of the cell phone and Lydia.

BRING HIM HOME TO US, DEREK

 

#

He woke up on a hotel bed, back throbbing with the phantom pain that came with scarring from the other world the demon slipped him into when she was angry, when she wanted to punish him.

He blew out a breath and ran a mental check of his body. His jeans were stained red at the waistband, his shirt long past destroyed. 

Standing made his head swim and his low belly ache, but the wounds were gone from his skin, a memory of a time he almost died. 

He showered clinically, hands ghosting over what needed cleaning. He closed his eyes against the spray and shivered as his hands ran over his hips where her claws had cut and scarred. Laughing black eyes flashed across his subconscious, and his hands shot away from his skin. 

“Jesus,” he muttered, one hand braced against the cool shower tile. A sliver of something like panic started in his mind, and he ran a hand down his chest where her hands had gone, and cupped himself. Even with his eyes open, he could feel demon fingers, strong and firm and—

Panic bubbled and rose up and he found himself on his knees in the shower, taking gasping, uncontrolled breaths as he shivered. 

#

Derek smelled the blood on the air long before he saw the Jeep, knew just like Erica and Boyd and Isaac knew. Stiles was dead. 

The Jeep hatch was open, blood on the handle, dripping down the side. The carpet in the back was soaked through to the metal beneath. Too much. Just too much. 

“Batman?” Erica called, soft and hesitant, like she didn’t want to step around the door to see what Derek saw. To see the blood. No body, and Derek wasn’t sure if he was grateful for that or not. 

A body meant he could take him home, see him buried. At least give his father something to put beneath a tombstone. Without the body...without the body, he could try to imagine a better world. 

He rubbed a hand over his mouth, scrubbed in the words that he wanted to scream into the air. He ran his hand back, over his hair and to his neck. 

The door opening startled him, but it was just Isaac, reaching in to snag the phone off of the backseat. He held it up half-heartedly, devastation on his face. 

Derek didn’t have to look at the rest of the wolves to know. They all knew. Stiles was dead. Erica and Boyd didn’t have to know the why of it, didn’t have to know what Stiles was doing bleeding out in the woods. 

“Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to tell everyone.” 

“I smell smoke,” Erica whispered. 

Derek drew in a deep breath at the door of the Jeep. It was stronger than normal, that smokey smell that lingered beneath Stiles’s skin. It had made him edgy, uncomfortable, for so long around the young man, and now, now he might be willing to crawl into it. 

“Stiles always smelled like smoke,” he murmured. “Smoke and amber and ozone.” He didn’t want to not smell that again, didn’t want to go back to Beacon Hills and leave it behind him. 

“Head back to the road,” he said, just enough of that Alpha command in his voice to assure they’d go. 

Alone, standing beside the Jeep, he let himself acknowledge that torn out feeling in his gut, the pain at the core of him that he thought he’d never feel again. 

He reached into the Jeep, pulled out a dark flannel shirt, and breathed in the scent of smoke and amber and ozone. That earthy, amber scent was distant in the way it got when Stiles was upset, hurt. He growled into the fabric, claws gouging holes into it, and turned back toward the road. 

He had to tell Lydia he’d failed her. 

The drive back to Beacon Hills was silent. There was no hyped up energy like there had been in the opposite direction, no questions, no whispers. He just drove, and they just sat there. It was all anyone could handle, he supposed. 

“Do you remember,” Erica said, voice soft, “before everything...Scott had gotten into his father’s liquor cabinet and came to classes in the middle of the day drunk. Stiles propped him up through gym class, keeping him running laps as he puked into the grass. Told everyone that he was sick, had the stomach flu. I only knew because I could smell it...the seizures...I had to be careful of smells like that.”

“He carried a Ninja Turtle backpack until fourth grade,” Isaac said, a sad little smile on his lips. “He changed to Batman.” 

Derek sat in the front, listening as they shared stories back and forth. Boyd sat beside him, his eyes closed as he listened to Erica and Isaac in the back. It was easier for some people to share. It was easier for others to listen. 

Erica cried herself out in the backseat, and by the time Derek put the car in park at the house, they were all asleep. Boyd woke when the door popped open, and he helped Isaac out of the car as Derek gentled Erica from his lap. 

He got them into the house, into his bedroom, where he’d never put in a bed, just piles and piles of blankets and pillows and endless comfort. They went and curled together around that flannel shirt as the sun rose. 

Derek left them, fine tremors running up and down his spine.

#

Lydia answered the doorbell with a feeling of fullness in her throat, like if she opened her mouth, she would scream and scream and never stop. 

Derek stood there, in his usual faded jeans and dark henley. He had an arm braced against the door frame, head down like he didn’t know there was more to the world except the cement porch. 

“Oh,” Lydia whispered, knowing. “No.” 

Derek’s head came up, eyes shining red with more than power. Lydia swallowed, and that fullness bubbled up and over in sobs, shaking, spine racking sobs, but she didn’t scream. 

Derek caught her around the hips as she fell to her knees, slowing her enough that she didn’t hurt herself. She pressed her forehead into Derek’s shoulder, hands fisting into his shirt, pulling him closer. 

He didn’t fight her, didn’t complain about the way they were crouched in the doorframe. He just held her up, kept her steady, let her cry into him. 

“I didn’t scream,” she whispered around hiccuping sobs. “How could I not scream?”

“It’s not your fault,” Derek said, running a hand up and down her spine. “It’s not your fault.” 

“How could we not know?” she asked. She should have known. She should have known he was dead, should have done something sooner. She thought she would know if someone she loved was dead. She thought she’d know. “I thought we’d know. I thought we’d know if he was in trouble, if he was dead. You’re supposed to know when someone you love dies.”

“It doesn’t always work that way,” he said, and Lydia buried her head into his neck again. 

“Don’t...don’t ever do that. Please don’t.” She wasn’t even sure what she was asking for, and he didn’t promise her. He just eased his arms beneath her knees, pulled her from the ground, and carried her into the house. 

She sat there, in his lap on the couch, her shoes staining the delicate fabric, until the last of that fullness in her throat had dissolved out in sobs and tears.

#

It wasn’t that Allison didn’t want anyone to know. It wasn’t even that she was ashamed of what she’d done, of what she’d let break her. Mostly, it was that giving someone the knowledge of where she’d gone when she’d died, of talking about the experiences...it would hurt them far more than remembering hurt her. 

Sitting in front of her mirror, putting make-up under sleep bruised eyes, she found she didn’t care. Derek had called her father, but Lydia had called her first. She’d spent the night carefully neutral, thinking about what she knew of demons and how to kill them. 

In the morning light filtering through the window, she had more of a plan than she’d ever had, more hate in her in that moment than in any moment in hell. 

“Hey, Ali!” Scott said from her doorframe, his smile reflected back to her in the mirror. She tried to smile at him, tried to summon the chirp and charm he expected from her. 

“Hey,” she said, turning toward him. “Hey, sit down. I’ve got to tell you something.” 

He hesitated in the doorway for only a moment before crossing around the bed, sitting down on it facing her, open, childish concern on his face. 

“Is something wrong? Are you sick? We can cancel—”

“It’s about Stiles,” she said, hands up to silence him. 

“He’s somewhere figuring himself out,” he said with shrug. “I’m upset he didn’t talk to me about it first, but I think he needs this, you know? He was doing some pretty terrible stuff before he brought you guys back. If he needs—”

“He wasn’t on a road trip, Scott,” Allison said. Something angry flared in her at his dismissal in the way he spoke about his friend. “He was paying for our lives, and now he’s dead.” 

It took a moment. She watched his face for realization, for pain, for anything other than the blank, puppy dog look he was giving her. 

“Paying for...but you all said you were fine. Chris said—”

“We are fine, Scott,” Allison said. She leaned forward, took his hands in hers. “Stiles isn’t.” 

“But Stiles was just...he was just…” His breathing came fast, quick and sharp and panicky, and this was the Scott she’d been waiting for, the Scott that worried after his best friend. 

Her arms wrapped around him, shushing and comforting, she wished it had come sooner.

#

Chris rubbed a hand over his mouth as he waited outside the Stilinski front door. The cruiser was parked in the drive, but no one had answered in the last five minutes. He’d called, left a message, done what he could to not spring this on the man, but desperate times. 

His fist fell against the wooden frame once, twice, and was caught on the third fall. Allison glared at him from where she gripped his wrist. 

“He’s probably asleep,” she said. “We should—”

“He’s not.” Scott walked around the corner of the house, shaking his head with a sigh. “I can see him sitting in the kitchen.” 

“So what do we—”

Chris threw his shoulder into the door once, twice, and the old hinges gave way.

“Dad!” Allison shouted, following him into the house. “We can’t just break into his home.” 

“Yes, we can,” Chris said, walking through the familiar living room and into the kitchen. John was seated there, glaring up over the rim of a coffee cup. 

“Is there a reason you’re breaking and entering the Sheriff’s house in the middle of the day?” John asked, voice clear and curt. If he’d been drinking, it wasn’t heavily. 

“Are you still the Sheriff?” Chris countered. 

“Why don’t you come over here and see?” 

“Because I’d rather you were sitting down when we talk about Stiles.” 

“He made it clear he wanted no part in this town, no part in anyone here. You leave that boy—”

“He’s dead.” 

Scott made a wounded little noise in his throat. Allison had to agree, her father could have softened that, could have made it easier on the man. In the end though, it wouldn’t be delicacy that got her what she wanted. 

Soft words, careful phrasing wouldn’t bring Stiles back, and they wouldn’t get Allison the demon spread across her rack. 

#

Stiles sat on the edge of the hotel bed, staring at a pale, red-headed woman on her knees in front of him. She smiled up, sweet and thick lipped and so very familiar if she was a handful of years younger. 

“I thought you might like this one better,” the demon said, running hands up the backs of his thighs. “And I left you in your own bed, didn’t I, sweetling?” 

“What the hell do you want from me?” he snapped. He couldn’t overpower a demon, not one that held the contract to his soul, not if he didn’t want an immediate flush straight to hell. 

“I want you to beg me for it,” she said, rising up on her knees, pressing breasts against his groin and rising to lick at the column of his throat. “You’ve been doing such a good job running errands for me until this one.” 

“I don’t want you touching me. I don’t want whoever this girl was screaming in her head because she doesn’t want you using her to sex up the teenage contract.” 

“She’s not upset,” the demon said, a smile on her lips as she pouted at him. “She didn’t have any power before. Men took from her and didn’t give back, but now...now she has the power. She wants to use it as much as I do. Let her use you right back.” 

“I don’t want you touching me,” he repeated, and her smile turned. 

She sprang up from shag carpet, straddling his hips and pressing him back to the bed. 

“You’re going to beg me, like a good little—” She bit her own tongue, blood welling up and pooling at the corner of her mouth. “You’ve got to want to beg me. I can’t forget that.” 

She slipped from his lap and smiled at him, whole and happy through the eyes and lips of a girl that Lydia Martin could grow up to be. 

“What the fuck is your problem? I’m never going to do that.” 

“I’m playing BINGO, sweetling. You know. B-I-N-G-Ohhh?” 

#

Two reapers lay dead at his feet, their corpses fading away to the shadow of nothingness. The Latin words were foreign on his tongue, some of them too complicated to translate on the fly. The demon had commanded, and he had done. 

Later, with the memory of them loose and fuzzy in his mind, he tried to pick out the meaning until he didn’t want to know anymore. 

#

“These go under your shirts, close to the skin,” Allison instructed, passing around pendant necklaces with delicately carved symbols. “They’re anti-possession. It’d be better if it was tattoo’d, but we don’t have time.” 

“Don’t have time for what?” Derek asked, sweeping the charm over his head, tucking it beneath the band of his collar. 

“Before I lose my patience and do this without you,” she said, holding up a black bag and rattling it.

“What are we doing?” Scott asked, holding the necklace close to his chest, like a delicate thing.

“Summoning the head of the crossroads demons,” Allison said, a smile on her lips. 

“Why would we—”

“Because that’s what Stiles was doing,” Boyd said, voice firm and confident, like he knew. The question in his eyes was the only reason Derek thought he was asking. “He was paying for our lives.”

“Because that’s what Stiles was doing,” Derek said with a nod. 

The pack, his Pack, was around them in a loose circle. Erica, Boyd, Isaac, Lydia, Allison, and Scott all stood waiting, like something was going to happen. 

“We could use more hands,” Lydia said, cutting sharp eyes at Scott. 

She wasn’t wrong, and Derek couldn’t fault her for it. They’d brought up asking Scott if his pack would help with killing the demon. Allison had even asked, but Scott was Scott. Violence turned his blood cold, and he wouldn’t involve his pack in anything that might endanger them...not even to avenge a friend. 

“I’m not going to let them help kill a demon, not for anything. I’m not going to bring a demon here, put our town on their radar again for—”

“For Stiles?” Lydia bit out, voice that dangerous edge she could make it when she was truly anger. “For your friend? For my—”

“Easy,” Derek cautioned, running a hand over her shoulder, down to her elbow. It was easy, this casual touching, easy to wrap his fingers at her wrist, draw her hand close to him. 

“I don’t want to be easy,” she hissed. “I want to be deadly.” 

“We will be,” he promised, and she shined at him. “Scott doesn’t have to be here.” 

“I won’t let you endanger our town.” 

There was a flash of red eyes, a shimmer of power that raced down Derek’s spine. He’d held the power like that once, that edge of rage and danger that made it rise to the surface when he willed it, that let him put his betas in their place. 

The power now, the second time, when it had come back to him slow and easy, while he built a life for himself alone in the middle of nowhere, was different. It came with the strength of sacrifice, of giving up everything for Cora and then letting her go. It came with finding peace with himself, with being able to look in the mirror. 

It came slow and easy and far more powerful than it had been before. He let it rise into him, fill his eyes and bubble out through his pack. A slow, rumbling treat built in his wolves’ throats. 

“We’re going to find the demon that took Stiles from us,” Erica said. 

“We’re going to make it hurt,” Isaac continued. 

“And then we’re going to kill it,” Boyd finished. 

There was a pride to watching them like that, knit together even after their time apart. Even after death had scarred Boyd and Erica, after years had passed between them. 

“Don’t make this a territory dispute, Scott,” Lydia said with a sway of her hips that was almost distracting. “You will lose.”

“I don’t want my town in danger because—”

“It won’t be in danger,” Allison said, soothing. “I know how to make sure it’s safe. We’ll trap the demon; it won’t be able to get away, to hurt people. Just...you don’t have to help, Scott, but you can’t stop this.” 

Scott’s jaw worked for several seconds before he snapped it shut, turned on his heel, and left them standing on the edge of the preserve, where it butted up behind the house. 

It was several hours later, after Allison had carefully drawn circles in salt along the ground, interlocking arcs and lines and sigils that made Derek’s eyes hurt when he looked at them directly. 

She held the bag out, dumping the contents beneath a tree. Derek eyed the objects — herbs and spices, bones bleached white and vials of palest white and blood red. 

“How is this going to help us find the right crossroads demon?” Isaac asked, and before Derek could second the question, there was a quick riotous flash of power. 

“Well, there’s really only the one game in town, buttercup.” The voice was cool, distant, and British, and it had all the wolves snarling. It belonged to a stocky, middle aged man that almost swaggered around one of the oaks around them. “Oh, look, doggies. How quaint.” 

“There are at least a hundred crossroads demons, and there were dozens of—”

“Your little team mascot and a pair of brothers that chaffe like sandpaper underwear have been very busy. There’s been a bit of a kerfluffle in hell, you see, and well, little ol’ me came out on top.” He flourished a half bow. “Which is why I heard you, instead of my underlings. I hold all contracts. I hold all souls. I am the crossroads.”

“Who the hell are you?” Derek asked, snarl and threat in his tone. The wolf had never lost the urge to protect, not really, not even when he’d been alone. Not even when everything had been given back to him. 

“I am Hell, green-eyes,” the man said, adjusting the cuff of his suit jacket. “But I suppose you can call me Crowley.” 

“Crowley,” Allison echoed, eyes narrowing in concentration. “But you were—”

“Stop living in the past darling, and start telling me why I’m going to hand over a contract that is doing me so much good.”

“So much… What good could the contract of a dead man do?” Derek asked, the niggling sensation of not knowing something important lingering at the back of his mind. “Why would we want his contract?”

“The contract is a soul, a soul is power. Even if that contract had gone stale, his soul would be worth holding it.” Crowley walked around them slowly, watching them all carefully.

“If it had gone stale?” Allison asked, staring at him, shrewd observation in her eyes. “Meaning it hasn’t?” 

“Well, nothing this week, to my knowledge, but what’s a week? Kill a djin here, smother a dying child there. Let a demon ride your cock because it’s better than following along with her latest little tirade? You can’t expect me to keep up with all of them.”

“Stiles wouldn’t have done any of that,” Erica said, a frown on her lips, color in her eyes and cheeks.

“You mean he shouldn’t have had to do any of that,” Lydia snapped. “Stiles would do anything for this pack.”

“Oh, don’t be such prudes,” Crowley chidded. “Just because we’re dead doesn’t mean the old bones don’t rattle. Doesn’t mean we don’t have a little fun, just as well as you wolves.”

“Will you give us his contract?” Allison asked after a pause. “What happens to his soul if we hold it?” 

“He’s been such a useful little tool,” Crowley said, petulant. “But there’s something I want now more than his soul. I’d part with it, and the name of the crossroads demon that brought him in, if you got it for me. I might even be convinced to make sure he’s not turning on a spit in hell right now.”

“Which is?” Erica spat, eyes flashing and claws roiling beneath her fingernails. 

“Ooh, I do like the ones with spunk,” Crowley said, crowing a laugh. “Find me a particular little bone blade, and I’ll give you the boy’s soul back. Of course, the demon that’s pulling his strings would need to be dealt with.”

“That wouldn’t be a problem,” Allison said, and when Crowley looked toward her, there was a measure of pause before he spoke again. 

“Get me what I want, little girl, and I’ll even see if I can’t send an angel to look after that tattered little soul of yours,” Crowley said, a smirk on his lips. 

There was a low, rumbling sound rolling through Derek’s chest. There was nothing wrong with the members of his pack. Their souls were theirs, they didn’t need some demon interfering. He didn’t want someone else laying claim to one of his pack. Crowley’s dark eyes darted toward him. 

“Down, down, Fido,” he said, stepping forward, closing in on the betas. The low rumble grew, bubbling from beta to beta until they were all snarling low in their throats. 

Derek stood there, torn between proud of them for defending theirs and terrified they would do something that would make the demon leave, decide they weren’t worth whatever the demon could provide them.

“We’re willing to get whatever you need if you can break his contract,” Derek offered. “Break the contract and keep what he paid for.”

“Now, wouldn’t be a business transaction if you could get rid of what the boy bargained for,” Crowley said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “I don’t need the soul of a hunter to torment my future followers. I can’t take the soul of a werewolf. The boy’s soul contract for my item.”

“Where do we find it?” Derek asked. “And how do we know you can do what you claim you can do?” 

“That’s what I like,” Crowley said. “A man of action. Man as gets things done, gets me my blade, saves their dear little mortal from a soul blacker than the ace of spades.” 

“I don’t care what you like.”

“Oh, but you should, little wolf pup.” Crowley held out a hand, and in a moment, there was a scrolling paper there, falling forward and dragging the gravel they stood on. “The contract, if I’m not mistaken, and I’m rarely mistaken.” 

Allison stepped around Derek, eyed the paper quickly with her hunter’s eyes, and nodded once. 

“Can you tell us what blade we’re looking for?” she asked, stepping toward him, into his space, personal and close. 

“Hunters had it last,” he said with a shrug. “Big, bone bladed thing. Real phallic like.” He smirked as he adjusted the cut of his suit. “You find it for me, give a shout, and I’ll get your boy squared away. We have a deal, huntress?” 

Allison looked over her shoulder to Derek, who stared at Crowley for a long moment before nodding. He stepped forward, held out his hand, expectant. Wolf reflexes should have saved him from the way Crowley gripped his hand and jerked him forward. Should have saved him from the wet, probing kiss Crowley pressed to his lips. 

It didn’t. Shock kept him still until the demon was gone, an echoing, mocking laugh on the air. 

#

Derek stood guard outside of a small shed in the middle of nowhere Texas, hands out to either side of him, lips parted as he scented the air. Isaac and Boyd had gone into the shed with Chris and Allison three hours ago, and none of them had come out. 

There hadn’t been any screaming or sounds of a fight, but he was still getting edgy. 

Erica and Scott were walking a circuit around the small shed, passing each other with barbs and snarls once every minute or two in front of him, and surely with more than words once again behind the shed. 

It put Derek more on edge, made him itchy in a way he hadn’t been before Stiles had called him back to Beacon Hills. He’d been...not happy, not really, but there had been no constant need to do something. He could wake up in the morning, make sure there was enough firewood for the day, food in the deep freeze, and he was fine. 

Except, he’d had no pack then, and now...Now he had Erica and Boyd, Isaac and even Allison. Lydia, maybe, if she wanted. He liked the way she defended what was hers, the way she was willing to go to the mat with Scott for the sake of her friend.

Her dead friend. 

It was difficult to think about, someone as energetic and full of life as Stiles Stilinski could die. His body was cold somewhere, decomposing in a grave or a ditch or a gulley in the forest. It was a point of shame for the wolves when they couldn’t find his body, couldn’t at least bring that home for John.

It left a bad taste in his mouth, an ache in his chest he was ignoring, and an almost feral need to tear the creature who had done it to pieces with his claws. 

This was the third underground bunker they’d searched in the last six months. Six months since they’d stood in front of the self-proclaimed King of Hell, and still, something about the encounter had sat funny in Derek’s stomach. Crowley had been evasive, elusive, on certain things. He was sure on some, vaguely uninterested on others, and for a man who showed up on his own, when they didn’t even summon him, didn’t know his name to call it…

They were being played by powers above and below them, and all he wanted, all the pack really wanted, was to settle a debt as much as they could. He wanted to take his wolves, his pack, and disappear so far into the world that no one could find them. He wanted to take them where he could shelter them, keep them safe and whole and hale, just like Stiles had brought them back. He’d take care of them, he’d make sure the kid didn’t trade his life for something fleeting. 

Erica circled back around the shack, a smirk on her lips as she passed him. Derek eyed her as she approached, raising an eyebrow when Scott didn’t come in the opposite direction. 

“We’re here on business, Erica,” he said, chiding but not seriously. Scott was… Scott was what Scott had always been, Derek supposed. He was morally upright, judgemental and oblivious. 

He wasn’t a bad man, but he was a bad wolf, a bad alpha, truth be told. Like Derek had been. Except, Derek had grown, hadn’t he? Time alone, without a pack, had taught him something Scott would never learn. Derek hoped he’d never learn. 

“He’s an alpha,” Erica said with a shrug. “He’ll heal.” 

“If he’s not back around, I’m going to have to go find him,” Derek warned, and the wolf nodded her head as she trotted around the corner. He blew out a long suffering sigh when Erica came back around the other side a few minutes later, Scott tucked across her shoulders, walking with a grimacing face and a hand pressed against his abdomen. 

Bright red blood dripped sluggishly off of the angles of his hand, but he didn’t say anything as they limped past. Scott just nodded at him, red eyes flashing like failing strobe lights as he tried to heal the wound and walk on his own power. 

The pair disappeared again, and Derek considered throwing himself down the stairs just inside the shack doorway. There were things to do though, things they’d been putting in motion for six months. 

#

Stiles wasn’t pleased with himself, not really, but this was at least on the side of the angels. No one ever said the angels were righteous. 

The demon bleeding into the floorboards had been burning its way through one host after the next for months, and finally, it had pissed off his mistress. The obsidian blade had ripped through the flesh and bone and into the demon itself. The thing had screamed and pleaded, but the Devil’s Traps burned into the floorboards and ceiling were strong enough to keep it where he wanted it. 

It had spilled secrets, secrets even Stiles wasn’t ready for, not really. Secrets to try to coax him into letting it go. Secrets above a crossroads demon sitting on the throne of hell, about a deal he made with a group of wolves that were hunting for something big. 

Stiles shook the blood off of the obsidian blade and dropped it, the blade returning to innocent stone as it jangled on the end of its silver chain. He looped it around his neck, letting the stone rest against the skin of his throat. 

Blood dripped down his jawline, into the line of his clavicle, soaking into the black t-shirt. He’d done fairly well, he figured, glancing down at himself. His hands and forearms were smeared with congealing and drying blood. His shirt would wash clean enough he could wear it again, and his dark jeans were free of any stains. 

“You know I have a thing for you painted in blood,” a voice cooed into his ear. The sharp sting of teeth raked down his ear lobe, the column of his neck, and bit down hard into the meat of his shoulder. 

He ignored her questing teeth and the probe of her tongue as it traced the demon’s blood on his skin. She wouldn’t draw his blood, not here, not where it would last. She’d tear him into her otherworld, that place she took him in his own mind that rended his flesh in the living world until she returned him to his body. The damage from her tirades there were inked into his flesh in white, smooth scar tissue. 

He stared down at the demon on the floor, lost in the slide of its blood between its fingers. It was easier, when she was like this, clinging to him and kissing, licking…

It was just easier to not be there, to be gone into other sensations. Pain was easily enough ignored, at least, the type of pain she’d make him endure here. More damning, in the next minutes, with her slinking down his chest, tearing his shirt from collar to hem, were the demon’s words about wolves. 

Hours later, with the touch of the demon still on his skin but the blood gone, he slammed the door on a little, stolen four door sedan. He’d dropped his last vehicle two towns over, walked the difference and hitched a ride with a middle aged soccer mom. 

They were looking for something big, the demon had said, and that didn’t sound good, not even by his new standards. He blew out a gusty breath, chilled the little, human core of him, and set the car south.


	3. Chapter 3

Derek sluggishly stuck his key in the lock of the loft, twisted, barely noticing the way it turned. Too easily, he should have recognized. Not locked, that information should have supplied. 

As it was, he’d been awake for three days, running hunters in circles so he wouldn’t bring them back to Beacon Hills, to his pack. The bunkers, hunter bases attributed to a fraternity known as the Men of Letters. The last one they’d kicked up in Nebraska hadn’t been abandoned like the rest. 

He nudged the door open, toeing off his boots at the door in the sliver of light from the hallway. He had his leather jacket half off, hand resting on the light switch, when he realized. 

The scent was off. A vague, sterilized blood smell was through the air like a wisp of smoke, there and gone and there again. Underneath it, buried in that fluttering scent, was amber and smoke and ozone. Familiar and forgotten, until that moment. 

His fingers shook against the lightswitch, not sure if he wanted to see, if he wanted to turn it on and know that the best case scenario was that he was losing his mind. 

“I’ve never seen you hesitate.” The voice that came through the darkness was low and husked, unfamiliar enough, even in the face of that scent that he flicked the light on. 

He hadn’t seen Stiles Stilinski in almost a year. The boy had been seventeen when he disappeared, gangly and long limbed, awkward like a newborn deer. There was a light in his eyes that had made Derek uncomfortable, like he’d tarnish the boy just by being around him. 

The man standing in the middle of his loft now was unrecognizable. He wore dark wash jeans, a black henley that almost made Derek laugh. He would have laughed, would have thrown himself at the boy’s boot-clad feet and just held onto the folds of his jeans. 

Except, there was a scar along the corner of his jaw, a white, old wicked thing that ran down the side of his throat and disappeared into the shirt collar. That scar froze his feet, the vacant, distant look to his eyes stole the rest of him. 

“You’re alive,” he whispered. It took him a moment to process before he took his jacket off the rest of the way and pressed the door shut. 

“Mmm,” Stiles said, waving a hand through the air. “My heart’s beating.” 

And Derek? Derek knew that type of living, that existence that left you burned out and hollow. He made something delicate inside of him shiver. Made the rest of him so lax with relief, so ready to just draw the man into himself and hold him there.

“We found your Jeep, the blood…” Derek paused. “We told your dad you were dead.” 

“Good,” Stiles said, and it was sharp and pointed. It was the most awake he’d sounded since he’d spoken. “I’m not staying, and you’re going to tell the pack to stop looking for whatever has your names in the wrong circles.” 

Derek stared at him, blinked twice and shook his head. This was Stiles, this was what he’d been before — self sacrificing and brave and thoughtful and aware. Before, it made Derek want to bring him closer and keep him safe from the world. Now...now it made him want to grab the teenager and shake him until his brain came loose. This was going to see him dead, really dead, not just missing, not just gone. 

And gone. Gods, didn’t that hurt just as much as dead?

“I’m going to what?” he asked, but the man just stared at him, blank faced and grim. 

Stiles walked toward him, careful and measured, laid a hand on his shoulder, and Derek was sure the shiver that raced through him didn’t come from him. The touch was fleeting, and Stiles snatched his hand away like he’d been burned. 

“Take care of them, Derek,” he said, hand on the handle of the door. “I didn’t raise them from the dead to let them get themselves killed. You’ve lost one pack; don’t lose another.”

By the time Derek had caught up with the words, the sound of the door, Stiles was gone, and there was a dull, aching thing torn open in his chest. 

#

“What do you mean we need to stop?” Allison said, voice cold and controlled, and there was a vague, niggling feeling in his chest that the rest of the pack were glaring at him. 

“This isn’t healthy,” he said, setting his jaw. “Stiles wouldn’t want this.” 

“Stiles doesn’t get to want anything,” Allison said. “He’s dead, Derek. What we’re doing? It’s for us.” 

She brushed past him, spine straight, and the pack followed her. Isaac gave him a half-hearted shake of his shoulder as he passed. 

“I know you’re worried about losing us,” he said, voice gentle. “But I think they need this more than they need to be safe right now.” 

Derek let them go, staring into the middle distance, torn between just screaming at them, telling them that Stiles, their Stiles, was alive but not who they would remember. But then, there was the way he’d stood in the apartment, distant and lost, parts of him torn out and pieced back together. 

Chris Argent was still leaning against the loft sink, staring at Derek like he was waiting for him to say something more. Lydia sat at the tablet a few feet away, watching him with sharp, knowing eyes.

“I’m not arguing with you,” Chris offered after a while. “But I’m also not an idiot. You were all for this until now. Something happened.” 

Unbidden, his eyes slid to the place where Stiles had stood in the middle of his loft. If he inhaled, deep and obvious, he could still scent the man on the air. Which was why he’d waited a week to call the pack, to bring it up, to bring them here. 

“Derek?” Lydia called. “Whatever it is, it can’t be that bad.”

“It’s worse,” he murmured, the words off of his tongue before he even decided it was worse. Before his mind registered that a living, breathing Stiles that looked at him with dark, haunted eyes, was worse than a lively, exuberant Stiles that had died in the back of his Jeep.

“What’s worse?” Chris asked, that sharp, hunter’s edge to his tone, like he’d half-guessed. 

“We need to talk to Crowley,” Derek said, and he found, after saying it, he had a plan tucked away in the back of his mind, building on itself as it went. 

“We don’t have the knife yet,” Lydia countered. 

“The pack isn’t going to get the knife,” Derek said. “I am, and you’re going to lead them as far away from here as you can.” 

“Why?” 

“Because Stiles isn’t dead.” 

#

Chris didn’t feel bad. He didn’t. He was protecting his daughter, protecting the boy he’d come so close to calling son so many times over the last few years. They were alive and well. They had family around them that loved them, that protected them. 

So, he didn’t feel bad when he went through a Men of Letters bunker in Louisiana and pulled out the biggest, ugliest looking blade anyone had ever seen. 

His cell phone rang in his ear as he propped it up with his shoulder. “Derek, I got it. Gonna take me two days to get back.” 

“I’ll send the pack somewhere Northeast,” Derek said on the other end of the line. “I’ll wait a day? You want to call Allison and let her know?” 

“Sounds good.” 

He thumbed the phone off, and snapped it shut. The little burner was old, still a flip phone for Christ’s sake, but it served its purpose. He pocketed the phone, tucked the blade into the black backpack slung across his shoulders, and ducked out into daylight. 

He had a bus to catch, afterall. 

His truck was left on the side of the road. His phone between the bus seats. It would be found days later by a cleaning service. 

As it was, he caught a bus, and a train, and then picked up a rental car under an assumed name. He was a careful man, afterall, and he couldn’t feel bad for protecting what was his. 

The dirt roads that came together were narrow, little travelled if the zero cars in the last three hours were anything to go by. He leaned back against the rental, his backpack by his feet, open, the handle of the bone blade just visible from where he stood. 

He’d buried the box only a few minutes ago, but he could already feel the power rising in the hair along his arms. 

“Poor little hunter,” a voice purred from his ear, and he flinched to the side, almost enough that he tripped over the bag. Almost. “What ever happened that you’re standing at my little old intersection?”

She was beautiful when she stepped around him, all long blonde hair curling in waves around her shoulders. She had bright, green eyes that flashed in the sunlight. 

“I’m looking for a specific crossroads demon,” he said. “Won’t trade my soul to anyone but her.” 

“Her, him,” she said, making a wishy-washy maneuver with her hand. “It’s all in the meat suit we’re riding.” 

“All the same,” he said. “Looking for a woman who made a deal just outside of Beacon Hills, California. That you?” 

She pouted out her lower lip, giving a little shake of her head, and within the span of a blink, she was gone. It took a while, standing there, burying and reburying the little box, waiting. 

She came with a laugh. 

“I hear you’re looking for me,” she said, and he liked this body better than the blonde woman’s. She was narrow and edged, dangerously lined. She looked like someone possessed like a demon should look, with black eyes and sharp angles. 

“If you made a deal in Beacon Hills,” he said with a nod. “Brought three kids up for a soul.” 

“That deal was such a good little trick for me,” she purred, taking a step forward. “You looking for something similar? Wanna join my little human puppet for what? A daughter, a wife? A son?” 

He didn’t nod, just stared at her a long moment before reaching down toward the backpack. He hesitated, drawing up a photograph of Allison, handing it to her with deft, firm fingers. 

She plucked it from his hands, smiling at it for a long moment until a little frown cut between her eyebrows. “This is—”

The bone blade took more force than a normal knife to drive through her stomach, and yet, in broad daylight, the demon’s body fell to the ground, and the black smoke from it roiled and ripped and rended, destroyed. 

#

Stiles had been elsewhere for a very long time. She’d wanted something, something he couldn’t even remember now, but it was important enough to stay in her otherworld for...God, how long had it been?

She’d been with him, raking nails along his skin, kissing the little welts that rose to the surface. That was better punishment, she’d said, better for both of them. It hurt him more than the lines of scars along his throat, down his chest, his hips and thighs. The bottoms of his feet. The backs of his ankles. 

She was creative sometimes, but he’d take her at her most creative over this...lingering pause. She’d left with a smile and a cackle, and that had been...days? Hours? Minutes? Had it only been minutes? 

He closed his eyes, took comfort in the pain at his shoulders ankle wrists where his hanging weight put the most strain, and disappeared into it. 

#

Crowley smiled across the corpse of the crossroads demon, eyes only for the big bone blade. The hunter had pulled through, he had to admit, had to admit that they often did far more readily than his own demons. It was good, having contacts on the surface that could see things like this done. 

“My blade,” he said, holding out a hand. 

“My contract?” the hunter asked. Crowley smiled. The boy had been so very useful, but with him sitting in a little pocket otherworld, slowly losing his mind, he was useless, far more useless than The First Blade, anyway. 

He snapped his fingers, ripped the contract from one of those little inbetweens, and held it out to the hunter. “Boy’s not really in a place where that’s going to do you much good.” 

“He’s not dead,” the hunter said, and Crowley smiled at him. 

“Poor thing isn’t somewhere dead matters.” He smiled down at the blade and held out his hand again. 

“What’s stopping me from running this through your chest?” the hunter asked. 

Crowley blew out a breath, trying to calm the quick little flight of hot rage. Hunters were always about the blood and gore, the short game. He’d made it to King of Hell, he’d survived far longer than Azazel and Alastair and Lillith. He’d keep on surviving because he could play the long game. 

He tore open the little pocket of the world where the boy was being kept, ripped him out and let him hang there, suspended by the chain around his wrists. 

“This enough for you?” he asked, waving the chain, making the boy turn on the axis. He was unconscious, looked ripped to hell if Crowley was being honest. His soul would be hole riddled, torn up beyond anything a mortal would want to live with. Demon servitude did that to good men, it was part of the reason why the ten year grace period had become common place. Before, in the dark ages, it was wham, bam, thank-you mam, now, walk with me to hell. 

“Drop him,” the hunter said, and Crowley shrugged, letting the chain go and brushing off his hands. The boy fell to the ground, soundless and limp. The hunter took a quick step forward, kneeling down and pressing fingers beneath his jaw. 

“He’s alive,” Crowley said, affront slipping into his voice. Like he’d drag a corpse to the surface to play games. Like he’d not adhere to his own fine print. “My blade?” 

The hunter held it up, handle first, and Crowley took it with a flourish. You couldn’t just hold the First Blade. No, you had to finesse it, savor the little rush of power that came with holding something so old it was—

“What did she do to him?” the hunter asked, and when Crowley looked down at him, he almost felt sorry for the man.

“Nothing he wasn’t compensated for,” Crowley said with a smile. “Three souls, one of them was your spawn, no?” He left the hunter kneeling in gravel, the boy across his knees. 

#

Derek stared down at the boy laying across his bed. He shook himself. He wasn’t a boy anymore, not really. Eighteen and with more depth to him than most people in their eighties. 

Chris had brought him in an hour ago, looped across his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, arms and legs dangling so limp that if Derek hadn’t heard his heart beating, he’d have thought him dead. 

“You got the contract?” Derek had asked as Chris laid the boy out. 

“Demon’s dead, the contract’s in the backpack.”

“He been unconscious the whole time?”

“Since Crowley pulled him out of thin air.” 

That had been an hour ago, and neither of them had spoken since. The manacles around his wrists fell away after Chris picked the locks. The skin beneath was bruised, deep purple rings that made Derek’s own wrists ache. There were thin, white scars, old scars, things that should have taken years to whiten out like they were, beneath the bruising. 

The same thin, white scarring that ran from the angle of his jaw down to his throat, where they were joined by more marks running over his throat. The rest of him was covered by long sleeves and jeans, so dark they didn’t show the bloodstains. That was alright, Derek could smell them. 

He let the boy lay another hour, another hour, another, and Chris was running a hand over his face and tapping away at his cell phone. 

“Allison said they’re on their way back, that one of our contacts called and told her the blade had been pulled out of Louisiana.” 

“How did they know?” 

“Probably saw me leaving on the cameras.” 

“We telling them?” Derek asked, and Chris fell silent for a long while. 

“If we don’t, he’s going to disappear.” 

“He’s going to try either way,” Derek murmured, staring at the boy on the bed. He couldn’t help but be drawn back to that sleep addled night, standing in his own doorway, watching a ghost tell him to stop trying to make peace with its death. 

“I’m calling John,” Chris said finally, and Derek couldn’t find it in him to argue. “After he wakes up.” 

Derek nodded. It would be best, after all, that the man not mourn his son twice. 

It was early morning when Chris got the phone call that Allison was back in Beacon Hills. He’d just slipped on his jacket and closed the loft door behind him when Derek heard the telltale blip in the heartbeat coming from the bed. 

It was slow at first, sluggishly kicking up to a waking rate, until finally, the man groaned, low and pained in the back of his throat and rolled to his side. 

“Where the hell…”

He hadn’t seen Derek yet, not from where he was leaning against the far wall behind him, the contract rolled up and held tight in hand. He moved like he hurt, like every muscle in him ached. 

Most wolves, most turned wolves anyway, never learn the shifts in a person’s scent, the way they sour or sweeten or thicken, the way they can go stale or old, distant or fresh and bursting. Most born wolves, the ones raised in packs, healthy packs, learn those smells, the nuances and subtleties, as cubs, still too young to speak. 

He knew what it meant when the sharper parts of a scent, the spicier nuances went dull and muted. He knew that the boy was in pain by the way the amber in him no longer tickled the back of his nose, the way the ozone smelled murky. Smoke was thicker in his scent. 

“You’re in pain,” Derek said, and the boy jumped, lurched off the edge of the bed and brought his hand up to his throat, tearing away a small, black stone from a delicate chain. 

Fear had always smelled sour on Stiles, like the fresh earthy smell of the amber had gone bad. Now, it flashed, quick and gone, replaced with something hard and distant. The boy had smelled like amber, smoke and ozone since Derek had met him. He hadn’t thought much of the combination, hadn’t really considered what it meant. People had different scents at the core of them. 

Hell, Scott smelled like honey and apples, and Allison had always been spicey cinnamon and clove. 

Stiles had just been another collection of scents, but the earthy, promising smell of ozone shattered, lanced through with the electric burn of lightning, and that little black stone in his hand was a knife. 

“Easy,” Derek said, hands up, the contract still tucked between thumb and palm. 

“Where the hell are we?” he asked, eyes flickering around a moment before he calmed, relaxed against the bed he’d been using for cover, and sagged. His head met the sheets, and the blade in his hand was released, falling to the bed as a little black stone. 

“You’re safe,” Derek said, taking a step forward. There was a vague, hysterical laugh muffled by the sheets. It was cynical, disbelieving, quick and gone. Derek heard it, just like he’d felt that flinch through Stiles when he’d laid his hand on his shoulder. “Do you trust me?” 

The question was hard off of his tongue, sharper than it should have been, but there it was, born into the world. He wasn’t sure he wanted the answer. 

Stiles kept his head pressed into the mattress, spine limp. He looked like a marionette, waiting for someone to animate him. 

Derek heard the answer in his silence. He didn’t trust him, and why should he? Why should the boy trust the werewolf that had fucked everything up so completely the first time he’d been an alpha? Why should he—

Stiles rocked back on his hips, forced himself to stand in a wavering, weak stance before he rounded the bed. His eyes were fixed on the contract in Derek’s hand. 

“That’s…” 

“Yours,” Derek said, and offered it out on his open palm. “The demon is dead. This is yours.” 

Stiles stared at it a moment, long and hard and solid. Derek just held it there, on his open palm. 

Slowly, long, pale fingers came up, looped under Derek’s own, and closed his fingers over the rolled piece of paper. Derek looked up at the young man, confused until he saw the long column of a throat, scars running the length of skin. 

“You hold onto that,” Stiles finally said, head tilted back, throat exposed, and Derek? Derek didn’t know what to say. 

“Why?” he asked, careful, neutral, when Stiles lower his face to look at him. 

“Because I don’t know what I’d do with it yet,” he said, and that hard, new lightning scent was in the air again. “The demon’s dead?”

“Chris killed it.” 

“Chris was supposed to kill me,” Stiles muttered with a shake of his head. “Until you trust me like I trust you, you keep that.” 

“I trus—”

The blade was at his throat, wicked and twisting, and just a line of blood seeped along it, there and gone almost as soon as it was withdrawn. Derek’s hand was around the boy’s wrist, had made him take the weapon away. 

“Until you trust me,” Stiles said again, and he was distant elsewhere. “Until I trust me.” 

“Alright,” Derek said, swallowing against the trickle of blood, of healing skin. “Until you trust yourself.” 

“How’s my dad?” he asked, careful and measured. 

“Angry… Less angry after we told him what had happened to you, but we didn’t have all the answers. I don’t think anyone had all the answers but you.” 

“No,” he agreed, running a hand over his mouth and stepping out of Derek’s space. It was odd, how close the human had been without the wolf wanting to shove him back. He’d drawn blood. He should have been a threat. “I tore his heart out, afterall.” 

There was a cynical little smile on his face, dark and hard, and it reminded Derek for one very terrifying moment of the Nogitsune. 

“Does he want anything to do with me?” 

“Does he...Stiles, he thinks you’re dead. They all think you’re dead, and you know what they’ve spent the time since doing?” Derek asked, gripping the contract and waving it at him. “They’ve been trying to get this, trying to find the demon that took you from them and kill her. They were avenging their friend.” 

“You know damn well not one of them sees me as a friend, Derek,” Stiles spat, and it was so vicious, so damned true echoing from his very bones, that Derek just sort of slumped against the wall, the fight gone from him. 

His heart beat had been even. His breathing hadn’t caught. There was no sickly sweet spike in scent that came with manipulation and lies. 

“You think that,” Derek said, voice even. “You actually think that.” 

“Tell you what, Derek,” Stiles said, and there was hurt and edge to him. “You tell me how else I’m support to feel about any of this. You tell me how the girl I killed is supposed to call me a friend. You tell me how any of them look at me the same when I could have done this years ago, Derek. I could have...they could have been here the day after they died. I knew how. I knew, and I didn’t do jack shit.” 

“You gave them their lives back—”

“I gave them a shadow of what they should have had!” Stiles yelled, getting in his face, pressing him further back against the wall. “I traded everything for a husk, and you know what?” He laughed, dropped Derek’s collar where he’d fisted the material. 

He never answered, just retreated a few steps, sat down hard on the bed, and stared down at the little black stone cradled in his hands. 

“Stiles?” Derek asked, cautious, careful. The hard edged scent of him was gone, swathed in a distant, vague smoke that drowned out everything else. He didn’t answer, didn’t so much as flinch when Derek shook his shoulder. 

Derek blew out a long, shuttery breath, laid his hand against the collar of his shirt, fingers running along the healed cut that had been made, and was silent. 

#

Stiles hadn’t moved from where he sat on the bed, vacant eyes watching the little black stone. He breathed and blinked and stared, so very similar to what Peter had been that it was terrifying. 

Derek slipped out the door of the loft, leaving it cracked so he could see Stiles on the far side. 

“What do you mean something’s wrong?” Chris asked, voice sharp as he jogged up the stairs. 

“He needs someone other than me,” Derek said, glancing back toward Stiles again. “I just made this worse.” 

Chris leaned around him, glanced into the loft and sighed. 

“You think his dad—”

“He doesn’t think John wants anything to do with him,” Derek said, cutting the older man off. “What is this?” 

“Crippling depression,” Chris said, jaw set. Derek knew depression, knew self-hatred and guilt and blame. They were old friends, but he’d never had to carry the sins of a demon on his shoulders. It felt even more wrong that it was Stiles, who had done this to save the lives of his friends. “I’ll call John. It won’t be long before the pack smells him out.”

Derek just nodded, watching the boy through the crack in the door. 

#

John was eager. For the first time since Stiles had spit venom and pain at him that day in the kitchen, he felt like there was something to do with his life, some sort of purpose other than maintaining a house, a job, an existence he wanted little to do with. 

Killing the demon that killed his boy? 

He quickened his pace, taking the steps to the loft two at a time. The cartilage in his knees snapped and popped, the first signs of an old man pushing himself too far, he thought. 

Chris was waiting for him on the landing, a grim look on his face that made his normal stoicism seem like a smile. For a fleeting moment, John had the thought that the demon was already dead, that he wouldn’t have the chance to look at it, hear its screams before it was—

“John, John, we’ve got to talk,” Chris said, hand up, pressing against his chest. John felt the press against his sternum. 

He didn’t want it, didn’t want someone stopping him, caging him, keeping him from tearing into whatever it was on the other side of that door. Who had the right? Who could tell him what to do? He was an adult, he was the sheriff, for however much longer, and he had nothing to keep him from—

The door was cool under his fingers, grating and heavy as it rolled sideways. The air in the loft was cool and thick with the familiar scents of the pack. Erica’s perfume. Scott’s cologne, too heavy in the air but distant. Familiarity made it thick in the air, even to his human nose. 

Derek was in front of him in a moment, hands up and waiting, but John wasn’t moving, wasn’t walking forward. Because there was no demon in the loft, no creature he wanted to dig his nails into and rend. 

A young man sat on the edge of the bed, blue jeans dark and shadowed in odd places with something John couldn’t identify. He wore a black, fitting t-shirt, stretching tight over strong shoulders. Large, long fingered hands were clenched together, pianist’s fingers knotting around each other. 

He knew the face. The strong cupid’s bow mouth, dark amber eyes, face usually so expressive was...vacant. Vacant like the worst part of John’s nightmares. 

“Stiles?” he asked, taking the steps forward until he was pressed into Derek’s palms. The wolf gentled him back a step, holding his ground, and John was almost grateful for that. 

The man on the bed looked up at that, and the vacancy, the desperate cold calm was better than the fracture of bedrock beneath the surface. 

“Hey, Dad,” he said, and that was his son’s voice. Derek stepped from between them, and the next thing John knew, he was on his knees, pressed between his son’s legs and pulling him so close his arms ached. 

Someone was shaking them, fine, little tremors that were almost violence, his hands spasmed sharp with pain, and his jaw clenched so tight to keep from sobbing that he thought he might break his teeth. 

“Stiles,” he muttered, pressing his face into the young man’s shoulder. 

Someone was muttering out broken little apologies, but John didn’t know if it was him or Stiles or Derek or Chris for all he knew. His son was alive, and he could keep him that way. 

It might have been minutes later, an hour, a day, but eventually, Stiles braced strong hands against his shoulders and eased him away. John settled back on protesting knees, sharply aware that he was older than he’d like, that he’d knelt on a wooden floor for an unknown length of time. 

“You’re alright?” Stiles asked, and it took John a long time to understand the question. Of course he was alright. His son was there, whole and hale and well. 

“Why wouldn’t—” The words tried on his tongue. He hadn’t been, not really. Not until he’d had a focus for the anger in his belly other than to burn it out with alcohol. He set his jaw and nodded once, sharp and firm. 

“Good,” Stiles said, and the tremor to his voice was startling. Familiar, shaking. John realized the shaking had been from his son, who still sat there, hands loose and hanging between his knees, tremulous. “That’s so good.” 

“Stiles?” John asked, horror slowly growing in his belly. 

“I couldn’t kill you, couldn’t do what she told me to do. So, I did it the only other way I could. She never used figurative speech after that first time. Got harder to think around things.” 

Vaguely, John recognized Derek on his periphery, heard the wolf leave the loft, close the door. He just leaned forward, rested his forehead against his son’s knee, and breathed. 

#

Allison knew something was wrong from the moment her father had told Derek to tell them he wouldn’t be meeting them at the next bunker. That feeling was confirmed when she got a call three hours out of town congratulating them on finding the First Blade. 

“Turn around,” she said, fingers already dialing Isaac’s number.

“Why?” Lydia asked from behind the wheel. She was already signaling to exit the interstate though. 

“Hey, turn around,” she said into the phone. “We’re getting off and heading back to Beacon Hills. Dad pulled the blade out of the last bunker.” She paused, listening to the other end. “I don’t know why. If I did, we wouldn’t be—”

“He found it?” Lydia asked, signaling to pull the vehicle back around to the on ramp in the opposite direction. “Thank god.”

The RPMs jumped on the dash, and the little sports car zipped up the ramp, wove into traffic and was twenty over the speed limit in a hundred yards. Allison gripped the phone in her hand harder, free hand finding the oh-shit bar in the roof. 

“Lydia, ease off. We don’t want to die on our way back.”

“If he found it, they’ve probably already summoned the demon, already killed it. They might even have him now.” Allison watched her check her blind spot quickly, weave around a semi-trailer and back again, passing a large truck on the shoulder. 

“We’ll get the demon, we will, but for now—”

“Stiles is alive,” Lydia said, the words whisper soft and reverent, like blowing a kiss onto a bubble. “He’s alive, and Derek will have him.” 

Allison stared at Lydia’s bright, eager face. Realization was clear in that moment. Derek had been acting off for weeks, and her father had been insistent that they take a break, that he go alone. 

“He’s alive?” she asked the windshield. Like the car was responding, the engine roared.

#

Stiles looked down at his father, sleeping peacefully on the bed in Derek’s loft. It was stripped down to just an old sheet. The bedside tables lay empty. When he glanced around, there was nothing in the loft, no furniture, none of the little things that made a space lived in. 

He swallowed past the ache in his chest that came with seeing a place so clearly abandoned. Derek was gone, had been gone, and the search for him had pulled the wolf back. Beacon Hills was poison to anyone with the last name of Hale. Stiles hoped Cora, Peter, and Maliha had learned that lesson well enough. 

He stood from the bed, careful not to startle his dad awake, and took a long, cleansing breath. His father had forgiven him, had called him son and had touched him despite everything he’d done. 

“He doesn’t know,” Stiles said, the words coming with the realization. 

“What?” Derek asked, from a few yards away. He’d been leaning in the window, trying to give Stiles privacy, if he knew the wolf at all. 

“What I’ve done. He doesn’t know.” 

“He knew you were working for the demon before—”

“But he doesn’t know what I was doing. None of you know.” Stiles ran his hands through his hair, growing long over his forehead and into his eyes. He winced at the pull of a wound, low on his hip. His clothes stuck to him, blood and demon ichor dried into the fabric. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Derek said, and when Stiles looked at him, his face was open, honest. 

“Sure it does,” Stiles said with a sigh. “It always matters.” He paused, drew another breath and tried to push away from the bed. He was tired, so very tired, but his legs held him up, if only just. “Is there...is there any way I can get a shower before whatever’s going to happen happens?” 

He almost expected Derek to deny the request, expected Scott or Chris or even his father to sit up, tell him no, that he was on his way to jail or hell or a basement somewhere as penance for the last year of his life. 

“Come on,” Derek said instead, and turned his back on Stiles. He watched Derek go for a long moment. He could cross that distance, he could come into step behind Derek, slip the obsidian stone from his pocket, and use it to cut the wolf from stem to stern before he even turned. 

He could press his forehead between his shoulders and just lean there, let the wolf take his weight and know he wouldn’t let him fall. 

The bathroom was at the rear of the loft, a large, walk in shower, narrow vanity and a toilet. There was a towel beneath the sink that Derek fished out for him, body wash, shampoo, and conditioner following. 

“You going to want to shave?” Derek asked, gesturing toward his own jaw. 

Stiles brought a hand up, running it against the scraggly mess on his chin. His hand shook against his own skin. He drew it away and glanced down at his trembling fingers. 

“You think that’s a good idea?” he asked, watching his fingertips shake. 

Derek just watched him with that carefully blank expression of his before he opened a drawer and drew out a razor, shaving cream, toothbrush, and toothpaste.

“Come on,” he said, gesturing toward the shower. 

Stiles stared at him a moment, and when it became clear Derek wasn’t going to leave, he blew out a breath and peeled the long sleeved shirt over his head. He didn’t bother looked for a reaction from the wolf. He knew what he looked like. Knew the lines at his throat were tame in comparison to the raking claws that had split his back, low on his belly, the little sporadic scars on his hips and thighs and calves, on his shoulders, across his biceps and chest. 

He peeled off the blood soaked jeans and boxers, kicked them into a corner, and stepped toward the shower. He was halfway to the glass door when Derek’s hand closed around his bicep, holding him in place. 

The wolf didn’t say anything, but Stiles could almost feel his eyes on him, running from the middle of his back to just above his hips, across the backs of his thighs, his shoulders, the base of his neck. 

Derek turned him, and when Stiles met his eyes, jaw thrust forward, alpha red stared back at him. The wolf tipped his chin up further, exposing his throat. This time, fingers tracing the lines across his voice box, down his neck to his chest. The questing skin fell away, but Derek was still watching, cataloging every place that had scarred, the bruising and cuts still lingering on his skin. 

Finally, he lay a hand flat against the wicked, thick rope of scar low on his belly, where a wolf’s claws had torn him open, a wound that should have killed him. 

“Werewolf,” he said with a shrug, running his own shaking fingers over the edge. “I should have died.” 

“The Jeep,” Derek said, nodding. “There was...there was a lot of blood.” 

“She didn’t want to give up her toy,” Stiles said, and turned away from Derek, unable to meet his eyes. 

The shower was hot, the soap clean smelling and clinically white. He scrubbed the dried blood away, cleaned the wounds with a rougher hand than was necessary, unroofing the scabs and getting some fresh, pink tinged bleeding. 

He almost stayed in there, behind the glass fogged shower, but the water was turning cold. He couldn’t hide forever, so he cut off the water and cracked the door. A towel was offered to him through the gap, and he took it, wrapping his waist with deft fingers. 

When he stepped out, Derek was leaning in the doorframe, a pair of sweatpants and a long sleeved shirt over his forearm. He held them out as an offering, and Stiles took them with a nod. 

“They’ll hide everything but this,” Derek said, gesturing at his own throat. There was a question there, in the set of his jaw, the look in his eyes, and Stiles couldn’t find the energy to lie to him. 

“I’m used to it. She did that early.” 

“Why?” 

“To remind me my tongue couldn’t get me out of everything she wanted me to do.” 

Stiles didn’t expect the slow smile across Derek’s face, the light in his eyes. He chuckled low under his breath, and Stiles pulled the pants up over his hips under the towel, annoyed. It wasn’t funny, there was nothing funny about—

“You could talk your way out of anything,” Derek said, and there was such open fondness there that Stiles startled, hands falling away from the button. “Get dressed, the pack won’t be far. 

“If I don’t want to see them?” Stiles asked. 

“You can do what you’d like now. If you want to disappear...we can’t stop you, but Erica and Boyd think you’re dead. They think it was their fault, even if it wasn’t. You going to let them keep thinking that?” 

Stiles just stared at him, leaning there in the doorway, looking for all the world like he would let Stiles walk right past him, let him disappear. Stiles tried it, brushed past him in the door, got halfway to the front before he stopped. 

“You can go,” Derek said again, and just like that, Stiles didn’t want to. 

#

Lydia was the first one through the door, her high heels making sharp snicker-snacks on the floor and each stair as she ran up them. Derek heard her, heard the thundering in her heart, smelled the anticipation, the worry, in her muted strawberry scent. 

She threw the loft door open, halting there, eyes wide, pink mouth parted, and Derek wanted to stand up from where he’d leaned on the window sill. He wanted to present Stiles to her, to draw her toward the young man and show her. 

Look, look what we have done, he wanted to say. Instead, he watched as tears welled in her eyes, as happiness roiled through her and she lunged forward, taking running steps before throwing herself into the young man standing in the middle of the loft. 

He’d been pacing, wearing a path in the dust. Derek had kept the loft for somewhere to fall back to if the house was ever compromised, but he didn’t spend time there anymore, not really. Taking Stiles there had been to keep his scent from the Pack if he had wanted to disappear, if there was something broken in him beyond repair. 

Stiles caught her arms, steadied her back on her feet. Derek couldn’t help the warm, growing thing in his chest from watching the pair of them, from wanting to wrap them in cool cotton and his arms and keep the world out. 

Pink, upturned lips fell against the chapped, thin press of Stiles’s mouth, and Derek was suddenly, painfully, intruding on something he had no part in seeing. 

It didn’t last long, not past the startled press, the moment of hesitation in both of them, and the easy, gentle time it took Stiles to push her away. There was discomfort, terror, horror, even on the air, and Derek wasn’t sure which it was from. Not with the cloying scent of muted arousal and mortification. 

“Lydia,” he said, whisper soft, and she turned toward him, a smile blooming across her face. 

She was tucked into him in the next moment, hugging and crying and pulling him closer, away from the window, toward Stiles. Stiles, who was nearly tackled by Allison as she came through the door. 

A moment later, Derek had Lydia under one arm, hers warm against his low back, as Allison settled Stiles back onto the bed, alternating between thanking him and berating him for being so foolish. 

Something in Derek wanted to rip into both of them — Stiles and Lydia — but a larger part of him had the gut wrenching urge to cover them, wrap them up beneath him and take whatever the world threw at them on his back. 

#

Derek wasn’t sure what he expected when the pack caught up with Lydia and Allison. He just wanted to take a moment to bask in the peace he felt standing in his loft, watching Allison curled up on the bed, her head on Stiles’s lap, Lydia sitting only a breath to his opposite side, watching with wide, watery eyes, taking in every little detail about him. 

He couldn’t blame her. Stiles had been gone for a year, one of his formative years, those years when boys stretch up suddenly and become the framework for the men they’re going to be in the future. Stiles had grown, his shoulders had widened and a compact cording of muscles had taken up under his pale skin. 

Somewhere in the world, Stiles Stilinski had grown up and grown in, and it didn’t take Derek’s wolf eyes to see it. Lydia had been excited, comfortable, and then Stiles had flinched at something innocent, innocuous, a brush of her hand against his hip, and she’d seen it. 

Since, she’d alternated between staring clinically and just staring. Derek couldn’t blame her. He’d done much of the same in those first few hours, while he slept. The fact that Derek had been allowed to check him for injuries deeper than the superficial earlier let him relax more than Lydia.

He heard Erica on the stairs first, the clack of heels and then the quick, skittering hault. Pride welled in his belly as the three of them paused, sensing the difference in scents around him. There was a quick little uptake of heartbeats and breath, and then Erica was running. 

The loft door broke off of its hinge, and Derek flinched as it hit the ground. Allison startled, sitting up off of Stiles’s lap, and in one fluid motion, Stiles was standing in front of the bed, his hand pulling Lydia forward into Allison, and by the time he’d looked to the door, both girls were behind him. 

“You fucking asshole!” Erica shouted stalking forward and meeting Stiles with a two handed shove to his chest. It wasn’t laced with werewolf strength, just the angry bluster of a young woman. 

Stiles took the shove well, rocking on his heels and catching her wrists to keep them both upright. 

“You don’t get to disappear and let us think you’re dead,” she shouted the words, angry and spitting. Stiles let her, and Derek thought for a moment, that he should intervene, step between them, use what was alpha in him to calm her. Except, Isaac and Boyd were thunder and lightning behind her anger, and Stiles was taking it well. He hadn’t flinched, hadn’t done anything but put himself between the angry werewolf and the humans. 

“I smelled your blood! I saw it soaked into the Jeep for months...I thought…” The anger leached out of her words, replaced with something small and fragile and so familiar from before she became a wolf. 

“Hey,” Stiles said, drawing her forward by her arms. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” 

“I thought you were gone. I thought it was my fault. Stiles, you were gone.” She whispered, the scent of salt and tears on the air. 

Derek watched as Stiles buried his face in her blonde hair and muttered apologies under his breath. Each word breathed into the air was unsettling, more and more wrong. You didn’t apologise for doing things for other people; you didn’t apologise when someone did something to you. 

“The Jeep had to be burned,” Boyd said. “I burned your Jeep in the woods, like some funeral pyre.” He didn’t say anything else, didn’t lash out or blame. “I burned your Jeep.” 

Stiles just stood there, holding Erica where she cried into his chest, wide eyed and so very haunted, as Boyd ripped open some part of himself to spill past his lips. 

Isaac laid a hand on Boyd’s shoulder for a moment before he crossed the distance and pulled Erica and Stiles both forward, into long, lanky arms.

#

Hours later, Erica, Boyd, and Isaac sleeping in the room at the pack house Derek had designated as his own, there was time to consider the warmth in his belly when he looked at Lydia and Stiles. There was time to consider he’d watched them without jealousy, just a slowly growing want. 

It wasn’t the time, wasn’t the place, but he was standing in the front entry, running his fingers over the delicate width of Lydia’s palmprint. 

“This is...this is better than anything I would have thought you’d have,” Stiles said quietly. 

Derek didn’t startle, didn’t pull away from the wall. He’d heard the heartbeat, the steps, smelled the scent of amber heavy in the air. He ran his fingers along the palms of each of his pack until finally he was hesitating over a blank void in the wall. Stark white where something was missing. Just like something had been missing from the pack. 

Derek smiled at the missing piece in the wall and turned toward Stiles. 

The young man stood in the doorway, eyes going from handprint to handprint, very carefully avoiding the void in the wall. There were bags beneath his eyes, fatigue in the set of his shoulders. 

“Did the pack keep you awake?” Derek asked. 

“I don’t sleep,” Stiles said, shaking his head. “Not for long.”

“Was that normal for you before?” Derek found he had to ask. He didn’t know, didn’t know what had happened with the pack after he’d left, didn’t know how the human slept before. He knew little about any of them other than what they could have done for him, for the pack. 

“Sometimes,” Stiles said with a shrug. “The medication helped...or didn’t, depending.” 

Derek just arched an eyebrow at him, and Stiles waved him off. The young man took a handful of steps toward the wall and the handprints. 

“This the pack?” he asked. 

Derek nodded, turning to give him room to inspect. He ran his fingers over them from left to right. A bright green Isaac, a blue Boyd, Lydia was pink and Erica purple. Allison’s was yellow and Derek’s the black that outlined Stiles’s place around the white. 

Faintly, Stiles pressed his hand inside the outline, taking its place for a moment before dropping his arm. 

“This is good, for all of them, the…” He trailed off, waving a hand over his head. “I’ve seen a couple healthy packs since leaving; the good ones all do something like this.” Derek watched something dark pass behind his eyes. “Some of the bad ones, too.” 

“There’s bad people in the world; it doesn’t make all of them bad.” 

The darkness remained, but a wicked smile pulled Stiles’s lips into a smile. Derek could see the humor there; he wasn’t sure if it had been at his expense or Stiles’s or the general world at large. 

“You’ve never been bad people, Derek,” Stiles said, that smile never leaving his lips. “You’ve just got blinders for the ones that are, and someday? Someday that’s going to kill you.”

“I’ve seen my share.”

“Somedays I think Peter was right, you know?” The question hung in the air, heavy and full of something vicious. It was startling, but the longer Stiles stared at those palm prints, the more Derek thought about it, he almost understood. 

“Packs have a name for a person who sees the evil in people first,” Derek said. “The Left Hand is a wolf willing to see the darkness and do whatever it takes to drive it out. Most packs don’t have one...they never need it, but the Hale Pack used to have Peter.”

“He didn’t stop the Argents.” 

“He didn’t know about her. I wanted to keep her secret, and I was supposed to be Laura’s Left Hand. He’d shown me more than anyone else, and I still didn’t see it.” 

“You were a kid.”

“I was old enough.” Derek drew in a long breath. “I wasn’t meant to be a Left Hand. I think I was meant to be an Alpha.”

“Second time around you’re doing pretty good,” Stiles admitted. “Better than the human bookkeeper.”

“You ever think that maybe you weren’t meant to be just a bookkeeper?” Derek asked. He walked past Stiles, laying a hand on his shoulder as he went. “This Pack? The Hale Pack? It could use a Left Hand.” 

Derek left Stiles standing there in the entryway.

#

Scott McCall had been smelling the familiar scent of his best friend on the wind for two days, and it was slowly eating through his mind. Stiles had always been a particular blend of earthy tones and something that Scott couldn’t place. After he’d been bitten, that had only gotten stronger. 

It was comforting, knowing the earthy something would always be there beside him, grounding him to the world of the living. Except, now, that was gone. Stiles was gone, and he was trying to hold a mismatched pack together by the skin of his teeth. 

It was easier before, before the True Alpha and before people looked to him for a leader. He had to do the right thing, the moral thing, no matter what he wanted, what he felt. It was harder and harder to separate what he felt and what the world needed. 

Standing in the preserve, watching Erica and Boyd and Isaac laugh and shove each other back and forth, was comforting. That meant they were alive, well, but it also meant Allison was well. Allison, who had come back with fewer smiles, less light in her eyes. 

Allison who wouldn’t talk to him about it. Allison who sometimes stared into the middle distance of the world and didn’t hear when he called. 

Which was why he was out in the preserve, looking for Derek Hale’s betas, while the trio play fought and re-learned each other’s strengths and weaknesses. 

“Scott!” Isaac called, and the other two stopped long enough to glance his way before resuming their fight. 

Erica and Boyd grappled for a moment before Boyd tossed her, clean into the air and over Isaac’s head. She came down in an arc behind Isaac, taking him in the low back. Her momentum knocked him off balance and sent him tumbling forward, right into Boyd, who was waiting to launch him toward Scott.

Scott rolled his eyes and braced himself, catching Isaac across his chest and righting the taller man. Isaac grunted an appreciative noise and was saying something that Scott couldn’t make out over the rush of familiarity hanging in his nose. 

He still couldn’t place it other than the thick smell of earth and something far smokier than he remembered. 

“Why do you smell like Stiles?” 

There was sudden stillness, a stillness that only werewolves seemed to manage, and it was enough of a tell that Scott was running, something feral in him snarling and eating up the distance between the woods and the Hale house on the edge of town. 

The house was bare on the outside, scrub grass growing a little too long, siding a dull grey-blue with grey shutters. The door was open before he reached it, and Derek stood there, snarling between him and the house. 

“Where is he?” Scott snarled, and when he drew a deep enough breath, he could smell Stiles in the house, in the entryway. 

There was a moment where Derek just held him back, held him steady, and Scott was almost calm, almost ready to take a step back, to listen, but Lydia stepped around the doorframe, and a fresh wave of earth and something like electricity came on the air with her. 

“Has he been here this whole time? Have you been risking this whole town because you didn’t want—”

“Scott,” Lydia said, voice rising, that edge of something that made her voice a weapon. “Stiles is here, but if you—”

Stiles was alive. He was alive and there, and Scott needed to see him. The anger, the alpha power, it all rose up in him, bubbling up his throat in a roar, and he was pushing. 

Derek flew backward, taking out a hall table and slamming into the far wall. Drywall cracked and fell around his head, punctuated with a flickering in the overhead light. Scott stepped forward, ready for when the wolf came at him. 

He wasn’t ready for the assault from his flank, for strong arms to slam him into the doorframe, for a sharp, cutting edge to be applied to his throat. 

It was the scent that startled him, that edge of something that smelled like a lightning storm. Stiles stared at him from over a black blade, darkness in his eyes and that rising smell of power and threat in the air. 

“Derek, she alright?” Stiles asked, and Scott was so confused for a moment that he didn’t notice the blade pressing harder, the slow trickle of blood against his throat. 

There shouldn’t have been an attack from Stiles, not Stiles, not when Derek was there, with alpha red eyes, coming toward them. Still, it was the human pinning him to the wall with a knife while Derek checked on Lydia. 

Lydia, who lay on the ground, nursing her wrist in front of her, face creased with pain. Derek crouched in front of her, murmuring softly to her as he helped her brace her wrist with one hand and ran fingers through her hair with the other. 

“Stiles?” Scott asked, gesturing toward his throat. “You going to let me go?” 

“Is she alright?” Stiles asked again, but his eyes never left Scott’s. It was that unflinching stare, a knowledge permeating from him that he would do what he felt necessary to defend Lydia, that froze Scott’s tongue. The cold press of the blade, the blood making itself known as it ran down his throat and soaked his collar…

“You’re not going to kill me because I threw Derek across the room,” Scott said. “Come on man, I just want to hug you.” 

“You came into someone else’s house, threw them across the room, and tossed someone else to the ground in the process, Scott,” Stiles said, and there was a chill there that was startling. “You don’t get to do those things as a human, and you sure as hell don’t get to do them as a werewolf.” 

“I’m alright,” Lydia said, small and pained. “See? Stiles, I’m alright.” 

“Derek?” Stiles asked. 

“Broke her wrist, maybe,” Derek said. “Just caught herself wrong when she fell.”

Just like that, the blade disappeared, gone in a quick rise of that lightning-storm smell. Scott ran his fingertips over the cut there, watching Stiles with wide eyes. 

Stiles, who had been nothing but smiles and energy and a soft place for Scott, Stiles...had held a blade to his throat and had meant to use it. He’d have killed him, just as easy as breathing. 

“Man...what happened to you?” Scott breathed out, and he found he didn’t want the answer. He didn’t care, not when his best friend had been so willing to cut him, to threaten him. “I mourned you, man. I tore myself up about you, and this is what I get? You’re going to threaten me? Let me think you were dead? You know who does that, Stiles? The monsters you’re so quick to see in everyone.” 

Scott rode the wash of rage as it came, and let it carry him out the door, down the stairs, and back into the preserve. He was no good for anyone right now, not with the betrayal and anger so thick in him. 

#

“Stiles?” Lydia whispered into the silence, almost afraid of the unnatural stillness and quiet of the entryway. This was their pack house. This was theirs, a place for comfort and pack, and Scott had come into it and made it something dark. “Stiles, are you alright?” 

“Take her to get that splinted,” Stiles said, turning toward them, vacant eyes passing over her from head to toe, settling on her wrist. “I’ll get this settled.” 

“Stiles…” Lydia watched him stoop down, start collecting the shards of a little ceramic bowl they’d had to hold their keys. 

“I can get that,” Derek said, and Lydia could hear the concern there. 

She knew the bones in her wrist were broken, that she’d reached out and braced too hard. She’d need a cast and six weeks, but at the end of everything, it was Stiles that Scott had broken open deeper than any of them. 

“Take care of your pack, Derek,” Stiles said. He stood, hands full of little ceramic shards. “Lydia’s hurt.” 

He left them standing there, in the entryway, and Lydia couldn’t decide which hurt more, her wrist or watching Stiles walk away from them. 

“Come on, Lyds,” Derek said, splinting her wrist in his hand and drawing the pain from her arm. “Let’s get this taken care of.” 

“You’ll call the pack?” Lydia asked. 

“If you want, they can meet us at the hospital.”

“They’d better not,” she hissed, and glanced sharply after Stiles. When she looked back to Derek, the alpha was hyper-focused, listening, probably. 

“He’s alright, moving around. We’ll call, make sure they’re on their way. They’ll look after him while we’re gone.” 

Lydia let him walk her down the stairs and into the Camaro. Inside, she braced her wrist on her thigh and struggled for a moment with the nausea that came with pain. Derek’s hand closed on her elbow, and he drove awkwardly, one-handed as they went. 

#

Two hours later, Lydia was dozing across the back seat of his car, intermittently making little, breathy sleep noises. They’d taken an x-ray, found the break, and had offered her sedation for the reduction of the fracture. She’d been hesitant, but there was no way Derek could sit at her bedside, leaching her pain while they put the bones back into place. 

In the end, they’d sedated her and splinted her wrist. She’d been loopy, confused a bit, but that had passed quickly, leaning into Derek’s shoulder and smelling of chemicals. The pain had come afterward, and she’d taken the Percocet tablet they’d brought her. The dazed sleep had come quickly enough that Derek had gone from supporting her across the parking lot to sweeping her up into his arms to get her to the car.

“Derek?” she murmured, voice small and childlike. 

“Yeah?” he asked, careful of stopping at a light. 

“Is he ever coming back?” that child’s voice was wobbly, bubbly with sleep and tears. She didn’t sob, didn’t do more than let her voice waiver, but he could smell them. 

“If we’re patient,” Derek said. 

“I miss him,” she said on a blown out breath. “I miss when he was mine.” 

“He’s still...” Derek didn’t know what to say to that, not really. He wanted to say that he was still Stiles, still the boy she grew up with. Lydia had known Stiles her entire life, had gone from tolerating him to loving him over the years. The danger, the world Derek had brought into their lives had made Stiles strong, had made him become the person Lydia had fallen in love with, but it had also taken him away. 

“He’s still our Stiles?” she asked. There was a lot of stress there, for someone sedated and dozing in his backseat. He glanced down at her over his shoulder to find her staring up at him. 

“Yeah,” he said, and turned back to the road. “He’s still our Stiles.”

The fingers of her good hand crept up through the seats and settled into his elbow. He left them there, glancing back when she didn’t say anything else. Lydia Martin was asleep on his back seat, her immaculate dress wrinkled and riding up high enough on her hips that he wanted to grab his jacket, toss it across her lap. He didn’t, though, he couldn’t get the jacket and keep her hand where it was. 

“You’re completely fucked,” he whispered to the windshield. The bright, sunny day outside just kept on, and he couldn’t help but think it was the world’s way of laughing at him. 

#

It wasn’t that Erica was angry, not really. It was more that she was worried, had been worried since she’d come up the steps to the house to find the door open. The wooden hall table was broken on the ground, the broken bits of wood carefully pushed to one corner. The keys had been picked up and laid on the living room coffee table. 

More worrisome than the door, than the drywall and the wood on the floor, was the smell of wet paint. It took her a moment, but her eyes found the new cornflower blue where it had been painted over the black and white handprint on the wall. Isaac was already staring at it, and Boyd noticed not a moment after. 

“Scott was here,” Isaac said, gesturing toward the doorframe. There was a small scuff there, in the wood. 

“Why am I not surprised?” she asked, and stalked deeper into the house. The pack house had been the only place Stiles had gone since coming back to Beacon Hills. After that first day, he’d stuck to the property. His father had come each night, having dinner with them and falling asleep on the couch so often that they didn’t bother moving the blanket. 

Everything was as it had been, all the doors and windows shut and locked. No one in the house that shouldn’t have been, but then, there was no one in the house that should have been either. 

Derek and Lydia had gone to the hospital, but Stiles had stayed behind. The phone conversation had been brief, so short that they hadn’t even gotten to why Lydia needed her wrist splinted before the call had ended. Now, Erica wished she’d heard more. 

“Stiles isn’t here,” she said, coming back down the stairs to the second floor. “He didn’t go with Derek.” 

“I’ll call John,” Boyd said, phone out and ringing. Erica could hear the dial tone if she focused. She shook herself and headed toward the back door. 

“I’ll run the preserve for a mile, see if he went for a walk. Isaac?”

“The loft and the Stilinski house,” he said, and she caught a glimpse of his back as he went in the opposite direction. 

#

Dereke eased the Camaro onto a little entryway to the preserve, careful to not disturb Lydia, sleeping in the back seat. He closed the door with a vague click, and took a deep breath of the wind blowing up the bluff. 

Stiles had left the house, had taken off, and for the life of him, Derek couldn’t blame him. Scott had a way of ripping people apart when he wanted to, with words and glances instead of the traditional claws and fangs. The wind brought lightning and promise on the air, and he smiled. 

Stiles had come to the same bluff the last time he’d needed somewhere else to be that wasn’t crawling with memory. 

Careful to pick his way slowly, to not rush and scare Stiles, to not allow him the time he needed to think, Derek waded through the preserve. It was cathartic now, more than it ever had been, to be back on the land. It held a vague memory, beautiful and perfect in those ways all childhood happinesses are remembered. 

The bluff was somewhere Laura had gone as a moody tween, and coming over the last rise, Derek was almost struck by the mirror there. Stiles sat with his knees dangling over the edge, watching the sunset. 

“You told me once, that I could talk to you,” Stiles called over his shoulder without looking. 

Derek smiled and crossed the few yards that separated them. He sat, much like he had that night before Stiles had left. 

“You still can,” he offered, careful not to touch the younger man as he sat down. 

“Lydia?” 

“Broken wrist. The hospital put it in a splint. She’s sleeping in the Camaro.” 

“I’m sorry he did that,” Stiles said quietly. “I didn’t think he’d care. He never did before.” 

“He thought you were dead.” 

“It would have been better if I stayed that way.” There was no spike to the heart rate beneath the words, no souring of the breath that let them out into the world. Stiles believed that, Derek realized, and something in him rebelled against the thought. 

“No,” Derek said simply. “No, it wouldn’t have been.” 

The silence that fell between them stretched, longer and longer as the twilight faded into the world. Resignation stank like burning earth beneath Stiles’s normally fresh amber and ozone scent. 

“You know why we kept looking for you?” Derek asked after a moment, after he realized he had to say something or let Stiles think it wasn’t true. “We looked for you because we love you.” 

Stiles stilled beside him, every muscle going tense. 

“Erica? Boyd? Isaac? They love you for what you’ve done for them, for the second chance you gave us all to be a pack. Allison gets to hug her father again, Stiles. She gets to live again.” Derek paused, drawing a long, careful breath. “You gave Lydia and I something we thought we’d never have again.” 

“I know making the deal was a good thing, Derek. I’ve been a demon’s bitch for the last—”

“What you don’t know?” Derek said, cutting him off. “What you don’t know is that Lydia has loved you since before that. She loved you when she thought you were safe for her, home for her, and she loves you now that you’ve made that more.”

“You two…” Stiles didn’t ask. Didn’t have to ask. 

“Not yet,” Derek admitted. “Maybe, in the right circumstances.” 

“It’s a relationship, not a chess maneuver,” Stiles chided. 

“Neither of us would do anything without you,” Derek said, breathing the words into the air for the first time. Admitting them. He’d danced around the thought over and over again while the pair of them took care of John, while they were on the hunt, had come close to making them more than thoughts in the car, but…

A sharp, bitter laughter bubbled up from beside him, and he let it. Let Stiles laugh until there was a sharp scent of tears in the air. It was the tears that drew his attention to his sense of smell, to the subtle undertones of Lydia’s wind and strawberry scent.

“Well,” she said, startling Stiles from his laughter. “I for one don’t understand what’s so hilarious about a declaration of love.” 

Derek let Stiles turn, let him look at the girl over his shoulder. Derek didn’t have to look. He knew she’d be bedraggled and tired, bleary eyed and consternated. Just like how he knew Stiles would stare at her, the shadow of everything he’d done diluting the shock and awe there. 

“Neither do I,” Derek offered quietly. 

“You...wouldn’t,” Stiles said slowly, turning back toward the skyline. 

Lydia sat down carefully on Stiles’s other side, accepting his hand when it was offered. Unlike Derek, she dove into the contact, pressing her head into his shoulder, taking her hand in her unbroken one and snuggling in deeper. Derek waited, watched and listened and scented for any sign of distress. When none came, he quietly scooted closer, wrapped an arm behind them both, and let the night noises calm him. 

Well after dark, with the stars and moon for illumination, he was the first to hear Erica and Boyd and Isaac reach the bluff. It took him longer to realize Allison was with them, with her soft, hunter’s steps and her spicy scent carried away by the wind. 

Pack washed over him, over all of them as the gentle lulling fell across the bluff. Erica settled in first, Boyd following her. Isaac and Allison sat down to Derek’s other side. The world below was a swath of darkness, of color bleeding with moonlight and shadow. 

Derek had seen watercolors in museums done in similar color contrasts and shadows. Leaning there, he figured their pack was built in the same way — bleeding and unlined and unclear. None of them, he knew, would want it any other way. 

#

Stiles dipped his hand in a tray of white paint, and it felt like coming home.


End file.
